Fuddland

Entries concerning the design or build of this website.

I realise this place has built up a few cobwebs over the last six weeks or so, but I’ll be doing some dusting and hopefully back into the swing of things soon, including the return of the genuine, actually-posted-from-my-mobile Moblog, thanks to a gorgeous new phone, although it appears that sending and receiving data over the mobile network is relatively prohibitively expensive out here.

[Interesting-ish aside: I can access Wikipedia from my phone’s web browser, but it’s blocked when trying to access over a standard internet connection.]

Anyway. Anyone still listening? How’ve you been?

I was going to come up with some clever China-related/relativity-based time difference argument, but the plain fact is I’ve missed the five-year anniversary of the inception of Fuddland by one day [almost two days!]. Oh well.

1675 entries [an embarrassing, below-one, 0.92 entries per day], 4681 comments [a respectable 2.79 per entry], and Fuddland is still going. Not as strong as once she was, but there’re legs on the old girl yet.

It’s been irking me for a while that some of the more complicated Chinese characters can be rendered illegible on this site when the font size is on the small side, so I set about cobbling together a Javascript-based text magnifier. Now, whenever you hover the mouse over some Chinese text, a nice tooltip-like box should appear displaying the characters writ large.

[Tested in current versions of Opera and Firefox, Windows XP.]

Oops, the search facility and the comment-editing wizardry were both a little broken. ‘Tare fixed now.

1565 entries [1.07 per day], 4452 comments [2.84 per entry], and still going strong: today Fuddland celebrates its fourth year in existence.

…mutter mumble blooming new version of Internet Explorer breaking my design mumble mutter mumble gripe…

Good job it’s only a beta version—I’m refusing to fix anything until the final version is out, so ner.

As Jann noticed, the previous entry and its associated comments disappeared from view sometime yesterday evening. In the interests of transparency, I’d like to point out that this was entirely accidental and not the result of some dramatic hissy-fit over a misunderstood comment.

Thankfully, even though it was deleted from the database, and before the nightly backup process had caught all the updates, the static file was still on the server and I was able to reconstruct everything—hooray for MT producing static and dynamic output! [Ooh, subtle sideswipe at users of a certain other popular CMS…]

Prompted by Gordon’s Laziest-of-the-Lazyweb-pleas plea, I’ve made a quick modification to my original Flickr-feed script, so that it now applies various effects [including greyscaling] to the grabbed images. [For example, mine are currently sporting a hint of a bevelled edge.]

You will need:

• The script [rename to flickr.php]

• MagpieRSS

• The GD2+ Thumbnail Class Distro

You’ll also need to ensure you have the GD Graphic Library installed—I’m not sure how you go about checking if it’s there [beyond the script failing]; it appeared to be readily available on my server so I’m assuming it’s fairly common for it to be installed.

See the original entry for more detail.

Read the rest of “Flickr feed parser update”…

1,416 entries [1.29 per day], 4,025 comments [2.84 per entry]: today Fuddland celebrates its third year in existence.

I could try and use this weekend’s unexpected loss [and subsequent full retrieval from backup] of my weblog database as some sort of backwards justification for not writing anything for nearly three weeks—if I’d written anything recently, the backup might not have been current enough to restore everything—but I fear that wouldn’t wash with anyone [least of all me], so I suppose it’ll have to be the boring old: I just haven’t felt like it. No real reason beyond that.

I started to write about the things I’d been doing over the last few weeks, but it all seemed rather pointless: I already know, and why should anyone else care? I find myself being less and less interested in writing weblog entries which are little more than reportage [such as, erm, this very entry]. But then commenting on, or having an opinion about, current affairs requires actually reading the news from time to time, something which I’ve also become rather lax about of late; I still skim the headlines of the BBC’s various RSS feeds, but rarely click through to the main article.

Instead, I’ve been lending a helping-hand to friends in a spot of bother [involving, amongst other things, a weekend of painting and decorating which was the most fun I’d had in ages]; forging new friendships; rekindling old ones; and of course, doing a bit here and there towards completing my PhD. The pressure’s really on but the end remains frustrating, tantilisingly just out of reach.

I decided recently that I needed to listen to some really authentic blues, and after a tip-off from a scene in E.R. of all things, I went right back to near the beginning of recorded music and got hold of Robert Johnson’s Complete Recordings, the fruits of just two recording sessions in which he laid down his repertoire of songs, classic blues that are still being covered by today’s artists.

Rejoice, for it is the return of the completely pointless, bandwidth-consuming, unique words list—this time in groovy random font-size weighted list styling that’s all the rage.

Notice anything different around here? No? Well, I guess that’s a good thing.

I’ve moved hosts again. Whilst Servage do offer good packages which would perfectly suit the majority of people, they fell short of satisfying the needs of this site. Specifically, my grievances were:

• You cannot run cron jobs on scripts that are not in the public folders. What this means is, if you want a certain script to run automatically every given period of time, it needs to be in the public folders [as opposed to private folders to which only the account administrator has access]. The script which automagically posts my Moblog entries is run by a cron job which checks for new emails, grabs the oldest one and puts the text and images in the appropriate places before building the entry itself; therefore it contains [in plain text] the username and password to the email account which receives the entries. Naturally I’m keen to keep those pieces of data out of the public domain, which is tricky [although I’m sure not impossible] if the script has to lie in a public folder.

  Furthermore, Servage allow scripts to run no more than once an hour, and if you want a job to run every hour, you need to manually set up 24 copies of the same command.

  To add frustration to laboriousness, they don’t send you or even allow you access to any error logs, which makes debugging one’s scripts or site very difficult: if a script doesn’t work when it’s run through a browser window, all you get is the usual “500 Internal Server Error” page—any debugging information has to be built into the script, which is still no good if it won’t even compile in the first place and you’ve no idea why.

• The control panel interface for the account is fairly basic and contains no information about how much storage space one is using—if you want to know, you need to submit a support ticket.

• Support tickets cannot be re-opened once they have been closed by Servage, so if they think they’ve dealt with your request, but you’re not satisfied, you need to submit a new ticket and explain the situation from the beginning because you can’t be sure they’ll look at your previous tickets. It took three attempts to get them to install one Perl module.

However, as I say, they do have attractive default features for most users, I just wanted things to be a little easier. So I’ve moved to Hostony, and it was the best server-moving experience I’ve had so far, thanks to a top tip in the MT Wiki. After uploading all my files [the Movable Type installation, plus all of my images, CSS files etc.], shifting my entire weblog—post, templates, everything—was a trivial matter of using phpMyAdmin to download a backup of the MySQL database from the old server, editing a few lines at the top of the file with a text editor, replacing the name of the database with its equivalent on the new server, and importing the file. I then just had to learn a couple of MySQL commands to change all server-specific text in the database in one fell swoop, and pow: 1,367 entries and 3,719 comments over three weblogs moved from one server to another in less than half an hour [and a lot of that time was downloading/uploading the database].

The only confusion came before the account had even been set up: I placed my order on the Friday evening, and early on Saturday morning [it was before my tea so I had only just got up] I got a telephone call from someone with a very thick, but indeterminable, accent, and it took me a minute or two to register that this wasn’t a marketing cold-call from India, but someone from Hostony verifying that I had ordered an account to be set up in my name. It was pretty comical that, once I’d figured out what he was saying, and confirmed that I did indeed order an account, he just said, “Okay, it’ll be set up later today. Goodbye!”

So after my daliance with Servage, welcome to Fuddland: The Hostony Years.

If you’re reading this, then the DNS transfer has propagated to your part of t’internet. Miss me?

Server shenanigans going on, bear with me. Or, if spontaneous nudity is your thing, bare with me.

Please expect everything to be utterly broken when the move goes ahead. Due to the new hosts PHP settings and my extensive use of PHP include commands and relative links, when I view this site at its new location with the temporary URL I have been given, it looks like this:

“Safe mode” has been disabled, but it apparently only works when viewing the site via the correct URL—that is, I’ll only know if it really works when the site is live. Not ideal, but since everything works now, I really shouldn’t worry. [But I do.]

See you on the other side…

Gosh, it appears my hosts Bloghosts have been forced to call it a day and close for business. This is rather sad as they really have been top-notch hosts; their customer service was particularly impressive. I’d like to personally thank Jay and his team for all their hard work over the last eighteen months or so.

Things won’t be shutting down until the New Year, so I have a little time to sort out moving to a new host. Any recommendations?

I’ve made slight changes to the “Post a comment” section for entries on this site, in order to—hopefully—make things slightly friendlier for all you lovely people who like to comment on my nonsense.

If [a] you’ve never commented before, or [b] you’ve opted not to save your user information, or [c] you don’t or can’t have Javascript enabled, then the comments section will appear essentially as before: the user information fields are first, then the textarea in which your write your comment, then the post and preview buttons [after the live comment preview if you have Javascript].

However, if you’ve previously commented and your details are stored in a cookie, things get switched around: instead of having to scroll or tab past the user information section, the comment textarea appears first, with the live preview and post/preview buttons below. The user information is displayed after these, since in general it’s probably not going to be changed very often.

Just in case you’ve altered your name [for, say, comic effect, you old wag you], it’s displayed just above the textarea in an Amazon-style “If you’re not Kev…”, with a link to jump to the user information section if you don’t happen to be Kev anymore.

I should mention that this isn’t an original idea, for fear of being accused of plagiarism: I nicked it from Dunstan and he explains the rationale pretty clearly.

I really am confused.

When I first tried posting the previous entry—even when attempting to preview it—MT kept throwing up an internal server error [code 500, for all you HTTP status code fans]. After some investigation, involving writing a couple of dummy test posts, it seemed that it was something in the text of the entry itself that was causing the problem. I started again, pasting the text in paragraph by paragraph, and discovered that this was the problematic string:

Just fill in this form with your name and address, make out £2 payments to each of the names listed below, insert in to an envelope along with correct number of postage stamps and post to adddress given below.

In fact, I can be more specific: it’s the string “insert in to”, which [the generally poor grammar of the text I was quoting aside] should say “into” not “in to”. Except that putting “into” next to “insert” caused the server error. Changing it to “insert in to” got rid of the error. So did changing it to “put into”, which is even more bizarre. I’m at a complete and utter loss to explain why the word “insert” followed by “into” causes MT [version 3.11] to give up the ghost, but it’s happening even with this entry, and even with a completely blank entry save for those two words.

Fuddland is closing its borders for a time. Thanks to everyone who’s been reading: friends, regulars, commenters, lurkers—you’ve all made it fun.

I’ll be back later in the year. In the meantime, be sure to look after the important things in life.

David

Almost forgot to mention: yesterday was Fuddland’s second birthday, which I celebrated in style with a specially-chartered boat party on the Thames from Westminster to Greenwich; cheesy music, over-priced [and over-consumed] white wine, a bunch of my friends and bunch more strangers. [Okay, so it wasn’t strictly in honour of my blogging anniversary, but still, not a bad way to spend an evening.]

I’m simultaneously getting a bit more confident in my CSS and a bit bored with my current design, so I thought I’d spice things up with a couple of oh-so-fashionable alternate stylesheets.

First up [but second designed] is a nice warm theme I’ve cleverly entitled “Warm”, which I kept fairly simple to give IE 6 a fighting chance at rendering it without too many problems; no dropdown menus, just a traditional sidebar with the navigation links, and only two images used in the whole design. I took some advice from a nice-looking weblog I came across and recycled the background image to make the blockquote backgrounds a bit more interesting, and in the process discovered what must be the strangest IE bug yet: Magik Creeping Text.

“Harps” has a darker, monochromatic look and the dropdown menus are back, but below the banner image this time. You may recognise the background from a photo I took at the very end of last year. In my continued efforts to promote alternative, better browers, and due to heavy use of transparent PNGs and the fact that the programmers apparently completely misunderstood what position: fixed means for background images, this style looks rubbish in IE, so I wouldn’t bother using this one [unless, for some reason, you want to make this site look terrible, in which case you want to try it in IE 5.5!].

If your browser supports alternate stylesheets you can have a quick look at the new ones to see what you think, but to make a more permanent change you’ll need cookies enabled and the stylesheet switcher.

Feedback/bug reports welcome!

I’ve long been an admirer of Lump’s commenting system, which allows people to edit their comment for up to 15 minutes after it was originally posted—it allows links that have been messed-up to be corrected or typos to be addressed [some of us could have done with this a couple of weeks ago over at D4D!]. So I was pretty happy when Mark Jaquith guest-posted on Scriptygoddess a technique for MT-based blogs to add this very function.

It took a bit of time to iron out a couple of general bugs, and then some fairly heavy editing of the script to get it outputting things specific to my layout [and to make that output XHTML 1.0 Strict-compliant], but I think it should be working now. I’m not completely sure it will work across all timezones, but time will tell I suppose.

I’ve set the time-limit of the life of the “Edit this comment” link to 20 minutes and the final time-out to be 30 minutes, so if you choose to edit your comment you’ll have a minimum of 10 minutes and maximum of about 30 minutes in which to make your changes, and you can edit it as many times as you like within that time. Note that MT still sends me an email containing the text of the original comment, so if someone drastically changes the sentiment of their comment, I’ll know about it. [Ooh, that sounds a bit like a threat doesn’t it?]

It’s come to my attention that Kinja users can’t subscribe to my RSS feeds using their usual paths, because my robots.txt file prevents the Kinjabot from accessing them. [Kudos to Kinja for making their robot standards-compliant.] To overcome this, please use the following URLs to subscribe:

• Weblog

• Weblog Recent Comments

• Moblog [Moblog is now part of the main Weblog]

• Bugblog [Bugblog is now retired]

Note: If you try and follow those links in your web browser, you’ll get a 404 [File Not Found] error; they’re specifically designed to be accessed only by the Kinjabot. If you’re already subscribed to one of the feeds via some other aggregator, you don’t need to do anything—the original URLs are still correct.

Read the rest of “Attention Kinja users”…

To further enhance the dynamic category pages, I wanted to take care of situations where a category was defined but no entries in that category had yet been made; ordinarily the page would be output with just a blank space where the entries were supposed to be, which isn’t particularly helpful to the user [it could easily be mistaken for a mis-loaded page, and refreshed a few times before they gave up and went elsewhere].

What was needed was a compliment to the <MTEntries> tag: an <MTIfNoEntries> tag. MT doesn’t have one as standard; a few googles later and I found that Jay Allen had wondered why, and the solution [but not the answer] had been left in his comments. I found nothing further anywhere else, so I just took the code Lummox JR had suggested, saved it as a file called ifnoentries.pl, uploaded to the plugins directory and bingo! I had a working <MTIfNoEntries> tag.

Read the rest of “MTIfNoEntries plugin”…

In one of the weirdest duets ever, for the Man on the Moon soundtrack Michael Stipe performs with Jim Carrey reprising his role as Andy Kaufman [and Kaufman’s alter-ego Tony Clifton], covering Fabian’s This Friendly World, and you can’t help but smile [especially when they sing alternate words during one of the verses].

With the skies so full of stars and the river so full of song
Every heart should be so thankful

[…]

The world is such a wonderful place to wander through
When you’ve got someone you love to wander along with you

With so much interlinking between weblogs it seems natural to try and form some kind of network beyond “he links to them, she links to me, I link to those people”—generally there’s no indication of what relationship, if any, the linker has with the “linkee”.

A relatively new approach to tackling this issue is the XFN [XHTML Friends Network] protocol, and it’s beautifully simple: all it asks is the addition of the attribute rel to your links, with values selected from a small list of options, and it’s aimed in particular at weblogs.

Read the rest of “This friendly, friendly world”…

Read the rest of “Dynamically-generated MT category archives”…

Read the rest of “Spot the differences”…

Read the rest of “Throttled”…

Read the rest of “Wrong DVD I’m afraid”…

Read the rest of “Feeder”…

Read the rest of “About face”…

Read the rest of “Upgrade downgrade”…

Read the rest of “The underlying number system”…

Read the rest of “metamorphosis underway”…

Read the rest of “if it ain’t broke, break it”…

Read the rest of “sneak preview”…

Read the rest of “back from the brink”…

Read the rest of “bye bye tie”…

Read the rest of “crossover”…

Read the rest of “here we go again…”…

Read the rest of “bigger, but not necessarily better, moblogging”…

Read the rest of “new tag discoveries”…

Read the rest of “serving better pages to better browsers”…

Read the rest of “concealment”…

Read the rest of “stylesheet forcing”…

Read the rest of “comment spam-preventing measures”…

Read the rest of “chek yoar speling”…

Read the rest of “rearrangement”…

Read the rest of “mo’ moblogging”…

Read the rest of “mobiley upward”…

Read the rest of “cron jobs”…

Read the rest of “let me count the ways”…

Read the rest of “anybody out there?”…

Read the rest of “bye bye word stats [part 2]”…

Read the rest of “overhaul”…

Read the rest of “taking a step back”…

Read the rest of “customer disservice”…

Read the rest of “i’m watching you…”…

Read the rest of “absolutely static”…

Read the rest of “manual blogrolling”…

Read the rest of “trackback link rethink”…

Read the rest of “problem with numbers plugin”…

Read the rest of “getting structured”…

Read the rest of “shorter sidebar”…

Read the rest of “strange browser bugs #234,983,458”…

Read the rest of “not so herish anymore”…

Read the rest of “ordinals in dates”…

Read the rest of “it’s all relative”…

Read the rest of “blockage”…

Read the rest of “don’t know my rss from my elbow”…

Read the rest of “category plugin switchout”…

Read the rest of “blogroll reinstatement”…

Read the rest of “combine and conquer”…

Read the rest of “bugblog-related updates”…

Read the rest of “alternative method for yearly archives”…

Read the rest of “bits and pieces”…

Read the rest of “bugblog”…

Read the rest of “dealing with sidebar overlapping”…

Read the rest of “downsizing”…

Read the rest of “down and out”…

Read the rest of “css inheritance”…

Read the rest of “commenter leaderboard graph”…

Read the rest of “how to make the word stats graphs”…

Read the rest of “back by popular demand”…

Read the rest of “bye bye word stats”…

Read the rest of “show your stuff”…

Read the rest of “old and new updates”…

Read the rest of “non-pop-up trackbacks”…

Read the rest of “goodbye google”…

Read the rest of “official ‘2,000th comment on fuddland’ moment”…

Read the rest of “faster inclusions”…

Read the rest of “when in doubt, ask an expert”…

Read the rest of “archival in the correct sense”…

Read the rest of “by jove i think i’ve done it”…

Read the rest of “joining the club”…

Read the rest of “plan a [revised]”…

Read the rest of “no more overlap”…

Read the rest of “putting a stop to search hits that do no one any favours”…

Read the rest of “more speed, less waste”…

Read the rest of “dashed links”…

Read the rest of “mammoth task complete”…

Read the rest of “more ie weirdness”…

Read the rest of “i can be in two places at once”…

Read the rest of “backtracking”…

Read the rest of “annual archives added”…

Read the rest of “colour change”…

Read the rest of “reorderage”…

Read the rest of “import\export revisited”…

Read the rest of “more about annual archives”…

Read the rest of “sizing up”…

Read the rest of “import\export”…

Read the rest of “second thoughts”…

Read the rest of “never ending optimisation”…

Read the rest of “changing my pants”…

Read the rest of “back to the front”…

Read the rest of “what you see is what you type”…

Read the rest of “separating the blog from the naff”…

Read the rest of “botty trouble”…

Read the rest of “something i bet you didn’t know about fuddland”…

Read the rest of “it takes patience to do things quicker”…

Read the rest of “to print or not to print”…

Read the rest of “select phew”…

Read the rest of “testing w.bloggar”…

Read the rest of “several hours of getting the css to work across browsers later…”…

Read the rest of “validiction”…

Read the rest of “mind not on the job”…

Read the rest of “what’s in a ‘nym?”…

Read the rest of “unique geek”…

Read the rest of “drop me a line”…

Read the rest of “comment linkage is go”…

Read the rest of “back to the blue”…

Read the rest of “inconsistencies”…

Read the rest of “viewer’s choice”…

Read the rest of “wringing the changes”…

Read the rest of “safety first”…

Read the rest of “ping pong”…

Read the rest of “backtracking”…

Read the rest of “not done one of these for a while”…

Read the rest of “more apparently inutile changes”…

Read the rest of “frontispiece”…

Read the rest of “behind the scenes”…

Read the rest of “ignore”…

Read the rest of “the choice is yours”…

Read the rest of “about time too”…

Read the rest of “photo_temp”…

Read the rest of “mrtn rocks!”…

Read the rest of “invetigation in progress”…

Read the rest of “content”…