Sat, 24 Nov 2007

Blosxom and W3C standards

I managed to tweak a few of my Blosxom files so that this blog is now "virtually" free of errors - it "almost" validates as XHTML 1.0 Transitional! I learned that the "blox" plugin, which automatically inserts <p> and <br> tags so you don't have to type them all the time, doesn't work properly when a paragraph starts with a tag (e.g. an <a href= ...>) and inserts <br> tags instead of (XHTML-compliant) <br /> ones. Also, it's best to escape characters like &.

When I corrected some of my posts and put them on the server again, of course they ended up on top of the stack - were posted with today's date. That's not what I want. So now I'm looking for a way to manipulate file dates on the server.

Posted on 24 Nov 2007 at 12:24 in /technology/internet/blosxom. -- Permalink

New homepage

I rewrote the index.html of my website from scratch. No more picture (of an onion which looks like a pig ...) but a portal: links to my web pages, both on site and elsewhere, plus the inevitable link to Tor. (I got the idea for the look and structure of the new homepage here.)

Posted on 24 Nov 2007 at 11:41 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Fri, 23 Nov 2007

Creating a feeds page - stuck

After trying several free PHP scripts, I'm giving up - at least for the time being. These scripts either don't work at all (produce fatal errors) or create HTML code that's dysfunctional in a ridiculous way (most of the code comes after </body></html>). I really don't feel like repairing something so utterly rotten.

The next step might be to try and figure out how the RSS sidebar widget of K2 works. First problem: where in the K2 code is this?

Posted on 23 Nov 2007 at 19:09 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Creating a feeds page

I'm trying to create a web page which will display several of my RSS feeds, in neat boxes sitting next to each other. Creating the boxes is, of course, no big deal with CSS. In order to convert the XML feeds to HTML which can then be displayed in the boxes, I need a script (preferably written in PHP). I'm too lazy to write such a script from scratch - although I would no doubt learn a lot in the process. So I'm looking for a script to download, which I can then adapt to my needs.

Posted on 23 Nov 2007 at 17:28 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

First steps with Quicksilver

I spent several hours last night and some more time this morning configuring Quicksilver on B.'s computer. I already feel that Linux is a flawed system because it doesn't offer anything like it! It's enormously useful - so fast, so intuitive, so powerful. The only plugin I just can't get to work properly is the "Shelf" - which, some say, is even more useful than just about everything else. B. likes Quicksilver too, even though she still sometimes starts a program by clicking an icon.

Posted on 23 Nov 2007 at 13:00 in /technology. -- Permalink

Thu, 22 Nov 2007

Photo Matt

The blog of Matt Mullenweg, the founding developer of WordPress.

Posted on 22 Nov 2007 at 13:56 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Making WordPress more secure

A whitepaper titled "How to create a secure WordPress install", and some criticism from Dougal Campbell (Geek Ramblings, a blog with a great header image).

Posted on 22 Nov 2007 at 13:55 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

An Irish photo blog

A blog full of (mostly) good digital photos, many of them taken in Ireland: In Photos dot org, by Donncha O Caoimh, a software developer.

Posted on 22 Nov 2007 at 12:13 in /technology/photography. -- Permalink

Wed, 21 Nov 2007

Helpful CSS pages

Two of them: a CSS cheat sheet and a collection of elegant templates which you can simply copy & paste.

Posted on 21 Nov 2007 at 18:33 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

WP-SpamFree

Is this plugin for WordPress even better than Bad Behavior? For the time being, I'm really happy with the latter.

Posted on 21 Nov 2007 at 17:49 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

"What makes you happy?"

That's what tamba2 asks in the title of his blog. He seems to be an interesting guy - more interesting than you would think when you read only his blog entries, not his "About" page.

Posted on 21 Nov 2007 at 17:11 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

delicious bookmarks on my blog

I integrated my del.icio.us bookmarks into my "entries" blog, in the form of a "tag cloud". Also, I modified the "My other sites" page, adding screenshots and photos. My server is extremely slow - why?

Posted on 21 Nov 2007 at 17:03 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Cleaning up a delicious mess

I'm trying to get my del.icio.us bookmarks under control - there are so many which I will never need again, or which don't even work anymore. Above all, there are way too many tags: 140 or so!

Posted on 21 Nov 2007 at 14:59 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Tue, 20 Nov 2007

New look for this Blosxom blog

I couldn't keep my fingers off the stylesheet - now just about everything looks different here from before. Colours, fonts, sizes, boxes, backgrounds ... And it's still a simple "text only" blog. I like it this way.

Posted on 20 Nov 2007 at 21:40 in /technology/internet/blosxom. -- Permalink

Changed sidebar font size - success!

I came back to the problem of font size in the sidebars of the Amity website once more and finally figured out how to make the links to other (Amity-related) websites more prominent while leaving the fonts in all other parts of the sidebars just as small as I want them. An unexpected success! And this is a solution which I'm happy to live with.

.widget_links a { ... } did the trick. This selects only those links which are part of the division whose class is "widget_links". Once more, what would I ever do without the "CSS sidebar" of SelfHTML?

Posted on 20 Nov 2007 at 19:27 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Deezer (2)

After listening to a few songs, I'm somewhat underwhelmed by the sound quality on Deezer.com. Johnny Cash songs sound overamplified (but I guess it's just a low-quality sound file they're using). Also, the music gets interrupted quite often, which appears to be a server-side problem: my internet connection is really, really fast. These problems just might disappear if I created an account - but if they persisted, what would I want with one?

Posted on 20 Nov 2007 at 18:54 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Deezer

A free and legal site for listening to music - sounds interesting.

Posted on 20 Nov 2007 at 16:27 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Changed sidebar font size

OK, so against my better judgement, I increased the font size for the sidebars on the Amity website - even though just a bit. I hope this will stop some dear colleagues from pestering me with "too small!" notes. At least I can reply now: "But I already made the letters larger!" Incidentally, by making this change I messed up K2 even more. Heaven knows how I'll ever get out again. Maybe I've already passed the point where re-creating the whole design from scratch is actually the easier and faster solution.

Posted on 20 Nov 2007 at 14:00 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Not updating K2

Regarding the Amity website, I think I'll leave K2 as it is instead of updating to the latest version. Updating can wait until a real problem turns up. It will be quite a hassle because I made quite a few changes to several of the K2 files, including the core.

Posted on 20 Nov 2007 at 11:36 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Bad Behavior, continued

In less than 5 days, Bad Behavior has blocked more than 120 attempts by spam bots to access my "entries" blog. No more than 2 spam comments got through, and these were caught by Akismet. Which is why I'm now installing Bad Behavior on the Amity website, too.

Posted on 20 Nov 2007 at 11:07 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Mon, 19 Nov 2007

Alex King's tumblelog

Maybe worth an occasional look? Another "blog by the wayside", and a very elegantly styled one.

Posted on 19 Nov 2007 at 18:50 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Twitter Tools WP plugin "broken"

I've just found out that Alex King's "Twitter Tools" plugin for WordPress doesn't work properly in WP 2.3. A fix seems to be on the way. (I wonder if anything is seriously wrong, apart from a problem with assigning the proper category to Twitter digest posts.)

Posted on 19 Nov 2007 at 18:35 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Installed WordPress using Subversion

Subversion works fine, so I can run it (using ssh) and do something useful with it! I installed WordPress on my server using Subversion, which was very fast. I then copied all the files I had added or changed from my former blog into the directory (almost forgetting the "Twitter tools" plugin ...) - and everything works! So now I should be able to update WordPress in a very easy and fast way whenever a new version is available. I still have a few doubts - e.g., will I be able to run "svn update" so everything ends up in the correct place? But that's something to figure out later.

Posted on 19 Nov 2007 at 17:24 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Trying again to install Subversion on my server

This time, I'm trying to install an earlier version (1.3.2): from the forums of my hosting company I learned that nobody has managed to install its latest version yet. When I tried first, I didn't get anywhere before installing the dependencies as well - I wonder what will happen this time. It's probably not an issue with the older version.

Even if I succeed, I may not be able to actually run Subversion on the server and do anything useful with it. But I guess it's worth a try.

Posted on 19 Nov 2007 at 14:47 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Blosxom blog headlines in WP blog sidebar

Using the RSS module provided by the K2 theme, I added headlines of entries in this blog to my "entries" blog. I'm still not 100% sure if it's actually a good idea to make my "Traces" so easily accessible ...

In the same way, I added the RSS feed from my Twitter page.

Since I'm not so fond of posting photos, videos, chats ..., I decided that Gelato CMS and Tumblelog (which integrates into WordPress) are not for me.

Posted on 19 Nov 2007 at 14:20 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Keyboard shortcuts for Google Reader

I've started using keyboard shortcuts - Binny VA has drawn my attention to their existence. Nice!

These are the ones I use most often:

• j/k - item down/up
• m - mark as read/unread
• A - mark all as read
• ? - help

Posted on 19 Nov 2007 at 11:05 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Sun, 18 Nov 2007

How safe is Hushmail's e-mail encryption?

The company Hushmail provides different e-mail encryption services: one where e-mails are encrypted by a Java applet before they leave the user's computer, another one where e-mails are sent over https to Hushmail and then encrypted on the server side. Neither service precludes the company decrypting users' e-mails and handing them to courts - so Hushmail does not protect data of people engaging in illegal activities. (A story on Wired.com)

Posted on 18 Nov 2007 at 22:52 in /technology/e-mail. -- Permalink

What Tor can be used for

It's interesting what you can do with Tor - set up an exit node and monitor other people's traffic for example. Apparently, this is what a guy named Egerstad did; he found lots of usernames and passwords associated with e-mail accounts used by embassies - and later posted these username/password combinations on his blog. Now he's in trouble with the police. But has he done anything wrong?

It's interesting, too, that quite a lot of Tor users still don't seem to understand that Tor does not provide strong anonymity - even though the Tor website clearly states this. A lot of people don't seem to understand the difference between Tor and end-to-end e-mail encryption. Well, too bad for them ...

Posted on 18 Nov 2007 at 20:16 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Fri, 16 Nov 2007

K2 and Rubin combined

In spite of what I wrote yesterday, obviously I couldn't keep myself from playing around with the stylesheet. I managed to integrate the colours of my "Rubin" theme into K2. I kind of like the result I've got now - and hope my dear readers will agree. And not turn away in disgust ...

The static pages on the "entries" blog - "About" and "My other sites" - are a lot less difficult to find in this new design. The navigation in the header is a real strong point of K2, I think.

Posted on 16 Nov 2007 at 13:55 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Thu, 15 Nov 2007

Better go for the latest K2 version

It's dawning on me that that database problem isn't caused by any supposed incompatibility between K2 and WordPress 2.3.1 - I guess I should just use the latest K2 release candidate for the Amity website. The problem is, I adapted quite a few things in the core of K2! Of course I should never have done that ... Especially since it's so easy to add custom stylesheets etc. That was really stupid!

Posted on 15 Nov 2007 at 19:49 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Finished adapting my K2

K2 now looks like it should. After some experimenting, I decided to go with the default colours - good-bye, my dear Rubin theme! I went for 3 instead of 2 columns, added a few things to the sidebars, moved the title and tagline to the right and made the header a bit narrower; otherwise, it's a K2 out of the box. Bulleted lists are fine, blockquotes display nicely, even the groups of pictures look good. This is very satisfying!

Posted on 15 Nov 2007 at 19:24 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

The K2 sidebar manager ...

... is extremely slow, but if you give it the time it needs, it delivers the results you want.

Now it's time to push the blog title and tagline to the right - and maybe change some colours, after all.

Posted on 15 Nov 2007 at 18:14 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Bad Behavior blocked its first intruder

I installed Bad Behavior an hour ago - and already it blocked an intruder! Akismet, in the meantime, is lazing in the sunshine ...

Posted on 15 Nov 2007 at 16:34 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Indenting text with CSS

I created nice indented bulleted lists for the entries on my "entries" blog. <ul> lists are used in the sidebars, too, but there I don't want to see any bullets or indentations. In the entries, yes. CSS has nice things like these:

• list-style-type:disc; (puts bullets before each list item)
• list-style-position:inside; (puts the bullets inside the left text margin)
• text-indent:-1em; (indents the 1st line of each list item to the left)
• margin-left:1em; (indents the 2nd, 3rd etc. line to the right of the 1st)

What would I do without selfhtml?

Posted on 15 Nov 2007 at 16:26 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Installed Bad Behavior

How could one not install something with such a nice name? Bad Behavior is a blog comment spam killer. I saw that, even when I had turned all comments off on the "entries" blog, I still got tons of spam comments. How can you prevent the bots which send out such stuff from reaching your blog in the first place? Bad Behavior just might be the solution. I'll give it a try.

Posted on 15 Nov 2007 at 15:26 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Struggling with my newsfeeds

I'm already struggling with my newsreader again - if I don't go through my subscriptions every day, things get out of control. Do I have too many subscriptions? Well, I just added another one ...

Posted on 15 Nov 2007 at 12:11 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Wed, 14 Nov 2007

K2 and WordPress

I thought about using K2 for the "entries" blog. On the K2 downloads page, it says that you should make sure you run WordPress 2.2+. So 2.3(.1) isn't a good choice for K2? Well, that settles it. I'm not going back to version 2.2.

Actually I'm using K2 with WordPress 2.3.1 on the Amity website - maybe this is why there are some small problems with the MySQL database. Apart from these problems, which don't really seem to matter, this combination works just fine. But it's probably better to stay with my "Rubin" theme for the time being.

Or does 2.2+ mean "2.2 or later"? But if it does, what causes those database problems?

Posted on 14 Nov 2007 at 19:40 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Habari blogging platform

Habari, as it says on the project's homepage, "is a next-generation free software blogging platform". Well, it's definitely not this-generation: the project has reached version 0.3 and is still beset with lots of bugs; work on Habari doesn't seem to be going on particularly smoothly. Still, the "free software blogging platform" part sounds interesting; and if we are to believe what it says in the FAQ, Habari just might be the answer to bad things like comment spam.

Posted on 14 Nov 2007 at 02:00 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Tue, 13 Nov 2007

Positioning the calendar

I learned how to create columns with CSS - fine. Decided I don't like it for this blog after all, though. So what I did is I simply positioned the calendar where I want it, up there in the right corner, and made a few other small adjustments. There are several divisions (in <div> tags) now in the HTML code to facilitate the use of CSS.

Posted on 13 Nov 2007 at 20:34 in /technology/internet/blosxom. -- Permalink

Creating columns with CSS

Even though I want to keep this blog really simple and don't want to add sidebars with lots of stuff - link lists, categories, archives, this kind of things -, I'm still interested in how to create a website layout which has several columns. Not using a table is, of course, a point of honour. So CSS is the answer.

I've just googled for "columns css" and found a couple of useful sites right away. Now I'm trying things out, hoping that the calendar up there will move to the side before long.

(Yes, sure, I've figured out by now that Blosxom is quite dead. Still, I like it as it is, and trying things out "by hand" is always fun.)

Posted on 13 Nov 2007 at 19:43 in /technology/internet/blosxom. -- Permalink