Blogging

I’ve recently made a few changes to my blog and thought that, in the self-referential tradition of bloggers, I should mention some of the decisions I made and how they affect my blog. The most external change, and the one mentioned in the title of this post, is that I do now have a domain to host this blog on. By “external” I don’t just mean it is potentially visible in your address bar when you visit any page of the blog, I also mean that it involved interaction with various third parties. It is a change I had been meaning to make for a while now, and one I should have made long ago, but hopefully it should last a long time.

Sadly all good things must come to an end, and if you tried accessing this blog at its old address this year, you would see that “The Esuna Networks project finished on the 31st December, 2008.” It was that project that provided me with my first hosting, and I am greatly indebted to it for granting me a home on the web for so long. With its demise, I have had to migrate to pastures new, and have found myself here at MTV Europe (no, not that MTV Europe) where my blog is free to continue, at least for now. I feel I do have to say, though, how much I will miss the excellent friendly service of Esuna, for which I never had to pay a cent, and that I hope the admin goes on to even greater projects and is duly rewarded. We were given plenty of warning about the closing of the service, and so for a while I had been researching alternatives before selecting this one, and I have been very happy with it for the few months I’ve been using it.

It was during my recent quality audit of my blog posts that I noticed in the “Entry Body” of my post about 1984, a series of links to a site called frostwire.com, 77 of them to be precise, each with a slightly different pharmaceutically themed query string. I couldn’t remember ever choosing to visit this site, or wanting to give people 77 different links to it, nor did I even know what for example dexfenfluramine was, let alone want to encourage people to buy some. If I had, in a moment of madness, decided that visitors to my blog did want these links, then I had gone about it the wrong way, because they were not visible on the post itself. This is because the links were all contained within a <u> tag with a display:none rule. I decided then that this text had been inserted into my post by a spammer.

So, it turns out that the wonderful import process didn’t quite go according to plan. If it hadn’t been for some very obvious changes in the way the syntax highlighting plugins working between the two platforms (“obvious” if you remember to check a page written under the old system after switching to the new system) then I might not have been bothered to go back over every one of my blog posts and bring them up to date. I’m glad I did, though, not least for reasons of nostalgia, but also because I managed to spot a few other mistakes made by the import process or by my former inexperience with blogging. Of course, I wouldn’t want to be obsessive about rewriting my old work to fit my current ideals, since then I wouldn’t get the benefit of having the blog as time capsule of my writing preferences and character, but there were some long-standing issues I had been meaning to fix to make my blog more readable.

I have actually been hard at work in my so-called spare time, developing some rather interesting pieces of software some of which I hope to share eventually. The end of the month does sneak up on one, though, and I often find myself in a rush to finish the second of my monthly quota of blog posts. Maybe leaving my blogging duties to the last minute is beneficial, though, as it stops me from devoting time to it which would be more profitably spent on programming and socialising. Here then is, I hope, a satisfactory collection of technical hints and tips, or if you are reading this right after I press “Save” but before I get around to finishing the post, an unsatisfactory skeleton of a blog post, starting with information about backing up Serendipity.

So, here we are in Serendipity Land, enjoying software that cares about security and stopping spam. One noticeable drawback is the lack of a built-in backup feature (although WordPress doesn’t any more either). My old system of manually performing a full backup after each post was, in retrospect, probably not the most efficient way to do things, though. I need to improve the backup system for the rest of my hosting anyway, so I will probably write my own backup script which integrates well with it. I imagine a system where my local machine triggers a new backup of my hosting provider’s database by requesting a hidden script file, and the backup it produces is a file inaccessible to the webserver but SSH-able to my local machine. Having a backup process is particularly important, however, for systems which you intend to use, and until I fixed the “No entries to print” bug, I didn’t think Serendipity counted as such a system. If you are reading this, though, that means I have successfully tamed the bug, and here is how I did it.

In the post title I use “real world” to mean “relating to a blog written by a person in, and hosted on a server in, the real world”. Software on the server has now been continuously gathering statistics about my blog for over two months, which means there must be an entire calendar month covered by the logging period. That month is 2007-06, and the stats software allows (or, in fact, demands) you view the data in one-month windows. However, as it is nearly the end of 2007-07, it is worth pointing out that this month looks set to have a similar set of figures. Here then are some observations for this particular blog for the period 2007-06, as a source for anecdotal comparison.

I have previously been curious about the precise effect my blog has on the wider Web. I knew that a few people had found it without my prompting because of the comments left on it, and at least one person had been helped by it. An early attempt at satisfying my curiosity involved grepping the Apache access logs for references to pages of my blog, and trying to get a sense of how many people had accessed it, and from where. This was early on, and I believe my very rough estimate was that about 30 people a month (not including myself and bots) visited the site. The other approximate measures I have are that:

1. my blog is preserved on the Internet Archive (reinforcing, although not proving, the view I held right at the beginning that any information I put out on here will be accessible forever),
2. it is the top result for “drab as” on Google (at least currently, and at least on my computer), and,
3. as previously mentioned, it is in the top 1 000 000 blogs at Technorati (even after their recent changes to the ranking system).

Still, my curiosity was not completely sated, and I think justly so, as, when people ask me how popular my blog is (which is one of the first things they ask), I have no real cogent statistic to give them. That is why I was glad to find out that my hosting provider (who I must say again is probably the best hosting provider in the world, and a really decent guy) was doing an upgrade to his server which included installation of a statistics package.

After setting up the anti-spam plugins for my blog, I said that they had saved me from having to block the trackback and comment features that WordPress provides. It is only now, months later, however, that one can get a sense of the long term effectiveness of these defensive measures, and also appreciate their hidden cost. The cost I refer to is false negatives: spam ending up in the moderation queue (instead of being deleted outright), in particular trackback spam accepted as being from a legitimate blog. While the situation has certainly improved, over the course of months the extra effort of catching these false negatives could prove sufficient to make one abandon the idea of an open blog. I will thus analyse the true situation so far, and also point out a piece of good news about the popularity of my blog.

An article from a while back about the threat posed to Free culture and commerce by technological control methods stuck in my mind for two reasons: firstly, the novel idea that some people might just abandon the mainstream online world and create an improved one, and secondly a comment which summed this up:

Maybe it’s time that geeks took their ball and found a new park. Count me in.

The irony, which people pointed out, is that these control methods would create a situation much worse than the one they are trying to prevent (the Internet being uncontrollable). Some have put forward the idea that control of the Internet need only be taken out of the hands of the United States of America, and that for instance Europe must take back the Web, or at least the part of it which contains the citizens of Europe. But the citizens of Europe do not need to be contained, as the right-minded citizens of Europe outnumber and outthink those people in the whole world that would wish to cause damage, and because, uniquely on the Internet, success goes to those with the greatest number and the greatest ability to think. I even apply this principle to the part of the Web I control (mostly this blog), and to deal with the potential damage faced by it, namely spam.

One of the things on my TODO list for some time has been writing some code to access the raw database of my blog posts. The most obvious reason is for generating stats, but I like to know I can ask questions about this body of data and get back meaningful answers. A particular question which came up almost 6 months ago was about the word count of my blog:

I have been thinking about a word count plugin, or just a PHP SQL (BASH?) hack, to give me a more meaningful statistic, but I’ll save that for when I’m running out of things to say.

I hope this doesn’t mean that I’m running out of things to say, and instead that I’m getting back to my core topics like programming. Anyway, I have produced a PHP page to generate a quite detailed analysis of word frequencies and counts, which I will discuss and present in this blog post.

… and the month ends in a week, so I better get writing. Of course I have come up with lots of great plans which I wish to carry out, document and publish on my blog, but I can’t write a post like “Advice for repairing a computer” every month. For now, I’ll take another step towards the goal I set myself in my previous blog post, of being listed by Technorati as one of the top 1 000 000 blogs.

A significant milestone has come around recently, and I thought it was a good time to be retrospective. That’s right, yesterday marked the end of my first year of having a blog (which I can determine from WordPress’s handy “Hello world!” post for 2005-07-30). Similarly, tomorrow marks one year of actually blogging, since 2005-08-01 was the date of my first blog post.

Make it stop! For a while now, the top section in my sidebar has been taunting me with its incorrect formatting. I had noticed that the title of that section was marked up as <h2>, possibly since the upgrade, and I’ve been meaning to fix it. I thought this would just be a case of changing the sidebar.php file, but on closer inspection it was clear that the extraneous markup was being added elsewhere. Here is roughly how I found out which part of WordPress to change, and what the change was.

As promised (but never instant) I have upgraded my [WordPress] installation to version 2,0,1 and I have to say, now that I am using it to write a post, it is looking gorgeous. The text box I am currently typing in has a toolbar above it which looks like it is made from a desktop widget toolkit. In fact, just adding that link was a usability dream come true, with the URL prompt allowing me to also specify a title, and the link now appearing as underlined blue text, not as raw HTML. Being comfortable with the technology underlying the web, and having not used many advanced web interfaces (except Google Maps), I perhaps had a low expectation of WordPress’s interface, and the old version didn’t bother me. I can definitely appreciate the improvement, though, and would encourage anyone to start using this as their blogging software.