August 2005 Archives
I had to fix two more problems that the MT 3.2 upgrade caused:
1. MTBlacklist no longer seemed to be working with 3.2, so I unloaded it and loaded on the supplied copy of SpamLookup. MTBlacklist's final score was 4380 spams blocked - I'm sure this would have been in the tens of thousands had I not been blocking at the .htaccess level. Hopefully SpamLookup will be as proficient.
2. I was using something along the lines of <MTEntryTitle dirify="1"> to generate the filename for individual entries. Unfortunately with 3.2 the dirify argument (which turns the title into a filename) seems to have stopped regarding '-' as a legal character for filenames, so (for instance) my entry formerly filenamed "stargate_sg-1.html" became "stargate_sg1.html" instead. Am now using the entry_basename as the filename instead, having corrected the entry_basenames for the existing entries to match their current filenames.
*cough* All go now. :P
If a page has a <link rel="next"> tag, FireFox 1.0.6 will prefetch the "next" page on the assumption the user is likely to go there next. In other words, it's treated in the same way as the <link rel="prefetch">.
This is actually in the Link Prefetching FAQ, as I found while googling for more info. I already knew about the "prefetch" link tag, but not the "next" one.
That's all very interesting, since it means if we include "next" tags on chapters in stories when we revamp Teaspoon, FireFox browsers will prefetch the next chapter. On the one hand, it means the next chapter will load faster for the readers, on the other it means if they don't like chapter 1, FireFox will cache chapter 2 unnecessarily. If we switch to static pages, that might not be an issue.
- MT 3.2 seems to have solved my problem with new entries showing entry #1 as the next link.
- Since the R4 run of Justice League: Starcrossed was frelled, I ordered the R1 version from Amazon - this turned out to be in the original movie format and have both widescreen and full screen versions. Much better than the R4 Justice League DVDs.
- As a side note to the whole Hotel experience, I saw the other week that Geri Halliwell's latest album has come out here, but I didn't buy it, because it had the same copy protection on it. Sorry, but I'm not paying $30 for a CD which may or may not work.
- Yahoo fixed the login issues with Yahoo mail not long after I complained about it. Both Briefcase issues are still there.
- LiveJournal still doesn't have trackback support, 8 months later.
Level: Horsell Common
Type: Vehicle CTF
Download Size: 7.55 MB
Rating: 7/10
Downloaded from: Unreal Tournament Files (File Front)
Description: The site of the landing of a Martian invasion.
So far, I'm liking it. Once my browser realised it had to reload the stylesheet, the CMS looked very nice. They've put a link to the trackback management page on the main menu finally, and done some very nice stuff... The multiple catagories dropdown is a lot easier to use. It also looks like they've added some new anti-spam measures and the MTSpamLookup plugin comes with it (I haven't touched the plugins directory yet because I wanna evaluate the new version first). Hopefully everyone upgrading MT will install it. We'll see how the anti-spam features go, anyway.
The plugins aren't listed on the main menu any more though, which is a bummer (and for some reason MTBlacklist is no longer giving me a link to configure it (not supported? Plugin protocols changed?)). If you look in the "extras" directory, there's a plugin for Open-ID, which is best explained by the linked site.
Also it took about an hour for me to FTP all the files up to the server and put them into the right directories. That's still a really painful way to update, despite the touted easiest upgrade ever. Perhaps I'm doing it wrong?
A while back I volunteered to help in the technical side of running A Teaspoon and an Open Mind, a Doctor Who fanfiction site. The site's currently using the eFiction CMS, though Barbarella (the other technical admin) and I will be writing a new CMS as eFiction is not great. Bugs fixed so far:
1. Disappearing Help text
Most of the text on the help page disappeared. The problem turned out to be because the text had < symbols in it, and when the help text was edited in the eFiction settings, either the browser or eFiction would cut the text off at that point. The solution was to double escape the tag to &lt;
2. Broken Mac posting
A user posting from a Mac said that their paragraph breaks were being lost and their stories appearing on the site as one huge lump of text. This was likely to be because the Apple line uses a different byte to signify the end of line, so the solution was simply to convert the end-of-lines to Unix format.
The last item is less a bug than an annoyance. PHP likes appending huge session IDs to the links on the site, so you end up with a hugely long URL with a PHPSESSID thing on the end of it. This causes many problems, including messing up the site's indexing in search engines - because the spiders get a different PHPSESSID each time, they keep indexing the same page over and over. The solution to the ID problem is three lines of code which go in the .htaccess file. Excellent.
That may still not fix the site's indexing in Google because Google is apparently wary of parameters called "sid", and eFiction uses "sid=#####" to select the story to display. It also uses exactly the same title on every single page (the site's name and slogan) which I'm sure doesn't help either.
Here's an interesting comment spam attempt. The spammer loaded a post, then attempted to comment to it (in the same second) but fell for the fake comment form which normal surfers don't see because it's commented out in the source. The interesting part was that the referrer they userd when fetching the post seemed to indicate that they had come from an email in a web-based mailbox. The spammers are sharing URLs, perhaps?
Also today I got around to banning Mr 195.95.219.6, who's been trackback spamming me for a while now using the user agent "Net::Trackback/1.01". I'm not banning on user agent as Net:Trackback appears to be a Perl project to enable people to create Trackback applications more easily and therefore it's not necessarily true that anyone using it will be a spammer. I wonder if the creator knows his work is being used for evil purposes. This spammer appears to be using one IP address all the time, so until they discover open proxies, I'll be safe from them for a while.
With the increasing amount of trackback spam, it's no wonder people are claiming Trackback is dead. So far, over the life of this weblog, I've had one legitamite trackback... Of course, I probably just need to be more interesting. :) I don't think trackback is dead, I think it just needs to adapt.
Dear myspace.com users.
My site is not your private image hosting server. Please do not remote link to my images. Thank you.
Yours in crankiness,
Alden (Do I have to put "please do not remote link" in every piece of alt text?)
The NZ National Party's latest political advert is very amusing and looks like it was done using Shockwave Flash. Most entertaining NZ political ad in recent time.
I'm still not voting for them though. :)
Doctor Who: The Long Game is on TV at the moment - it's actually better than I remember!
You may remember a while back, I posted about how Yahoo hadn't indexed the NZDWFC subdomain very well. I said I'd update with the results in a few months but, um, I forgot.
The results are that the number of pages from the subdomain listed in the Yahoo index has gone from 5 to over a thousand (about 1630, Yahoo reports). This is good. There were only about 2300 redirects last month, as opposed to 4600 in August last year, 432 of last month's resulting from Slurp (Yahoo's web spider) and 140 of them from people searching on Yahoo for stuff. Reducing these values to 0 is impossible, because Yahoo strips the trailing / off URLs, meaning they will always link to (for instance) http://www.tetrap.com/lj instead of http://www.tetrap.com/lj/ and thus causing an unnecessary redirect.
And I see they finally caught up with my music subdomain
Of course, other than the trailing / problem, Yahoo seems to be indexing a lot better than they were last year. And recently announced they had something like 20 billion pages in their index.
OTOH, the www.doctorwho.org.nz domain which points to the NZDWFC site used to show up in Google's NZ index but doesn't any more. I think this is because the domain registration company switched it from doing a permanent redirect to bringing up a page with a meta refresh on it. I have now pointed the domain directly at tetrap.com and I'm doing the redirect myself, so hopefully the NZ domain will reappear in Google's NZ index...
