DanRochman.com

An actual burning man attendee? Well How-dee! I’m a pretty huge DDR fan as well. I can’t believe I’m posting on THE Dan Rochman’s blog! I feel so big. Alright, all of you blog-rollers, live long lives and take more pictures.

You might wanna try some different colors around here. Default doesn’t fit you. Gotta go!

I just upgraded to the *very* latest (nightly) WordPress build, so:
- I’m out on the bleeding edge, and the site might just crash (but at least it’s backed up)
- the style reverted to the new default WordPress style theme, which I like well enough, so I’m leaving it as-is (for now)

Arnon commented that from where he sits, ALL of the images in my blog are of Blossom (the leader of The Powerpuff Girls) saying “Stop leeching or I’ll kick your arse!” This is my cutesy (and blatantly copyright-infringing) way of discouraging the somewhat nefarious practice of hotlinking. In geek terms, this can happen if your client (browser, blog reader, whatever) pulls images off of my web server in an odd way, or if your client (or a proxy in front of your client) munges up the HTTP_REFERER header somehow. In non-geek terms, if you have this problem, then EVERY image in this blog will be replaced with the following image:

If Arnon’s the only one having this problem, then… Well, he was born to suffer, I guess. And he’s been the only one to mention it so far. So if you’ve ever noticed this problem, but haven’t mentioned it before, please comment on this entry and let me know. I don’t like hotlinking, but I certainly don’t want the countermeasures to mess up the site for innocent (or, in Arnon’s case, not-so-innocent) bystanders.

In other news, I’m bashing on Arnon today mainly because: (a) it’s fun; (b) Arnon and Rowan are coming to visit us in early March; (c) it’s hella fun; and (d) there’s nothing he can do about it. Um, at least not until he gets here. Oops.

I’m a few days late with this, but what the heck - I took the weekend off. Anyhow, the online photo gallery allows anyone to comment on any photo, which is neat. The only trouble is that there’s no (built-in) provision for viewing the most recent comments. Out of the box, you’d need to go back and look at every photo in order to see what (if any) new comments had been posted to it. That might not suck too badly for visitors, but it sucked for me as the host…

Fortunately, a fix was out there waiting to be found, and I found it. [A big THANK YOU to Brian Park for creating and sharing it.] And I even managed to install it. So now, if you visit the Most Recent Photo Comments page, you can see the result. The good news is this script has allowed me to find comments that were posted months ago, but which I’d never stumbled across before. The bad news is that there hasn’t been a new comment in months - mostly my bad, since I haven’t really uploaded many (any?) new pics. Now that some of the underlying pieces of the web site are coming together, uploading new pics is moving back up my list of things of to do. [Someday, I will post a blog entry that consists of my List of Things To Do. Ironically, that means I now must add this TO my List of Things To Do. Shades of Russell's Paradox. But not really.]

Mercifully, I haven’t been getting much comment spam on the blog lately, and have never seen *any* comment spam in the photo gallery - I’m hoping that application’s commenting mechanism stays under the spammers’ collective radar.

I used to use AWStats to analyze my web server logs. Since migrating to this new server, I hadn’t gotten around to installing a log analyzer. I was going to finally re-install AWStats the other night, but figured that while I was starting over I’d make the switch to Analog (supplemented by Report Magic) instead. The results can be found at the new “stats” page. Cool, no? Well, cool for me. I never had the stats in a publicly accessible part of the site before, since it’s unlikely anyone else would be interested, but you never know. There’s not much there yet, since I didn’t bring over the logs from the old server, and I only enabled logging on the new server just last night, but the general idea comes through. I’ll be tweaking it for a while (getting rid of referer spam, doing DNS lookups, et cetera). And yes, it should be “referrer” spam, but somehow a typo got codified into the HTTP standard. Slackers.

Speaking of typos, Arnon mentioned that the comment form asks you for a URI (as opposed to a URL) when you post a comment. Note that this is NOT a typo. URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator, and is certainly a far more widely used term. But a URI (as the acronym tag on that text points out) is a Universal Resource Identifier, and some might argue that it’s the more appropriate term to use. More information can be had at the W3C page on Naming and Addressing, as well as the infamous “URI Clarification” document of September 2001 (I’m sure we all remember THAT one with a chuckle). The short version (from RFC 2396) is:

A URI can be further classified as a locator, a name, or both. The term “Uniform Resource Locator” (URL) refers to the subset of URI that identify resources via a representation of their primary access mechanism (e.g., their network “location”), rather than identifying the resource by name or by some other attribute(s) of that resource. The term “Uniform Resource Name” (URN) refers to the subset of URI that are required to remain globally unique and persistent even when the resource ceases to exist or becomes unavailable.

Now has everyone got that whole URI vs. URL vs. URN distinction all clear in their minds? Groovy. Let’s move on.
I’ve also got a cool little hack I found for the online photo gallery, but it’s late and Em’s already gone to bed. I’ll turn that loose (and post about it) tomorrow.

Oh, and the image of the pen at the top of the home page has to go, and will go eventually. It simply came with the style sheet that I ripped off, and I didn’t want a broken image link, and I was too lazy to take it out, and… I’ll get around to it.

I finally got fed up with the out-of-the-box WordPress style. Aesthetics aside, it was just too hard the read - the font choice sucked, and there was a lot of light-grey text over a white background. There’s supposed to be support for themes in the next version of WordPress, but the interim solution I opted for was to simply steal a better stylesheet. Being lazy, I did a quick sampling of Alex King’s library of WordPress styles, and stole a decent (and more legible) style called “Rubric”. Let me know what you think, and how the site looks in your browser.

Hooray! I figured out (well, partly) mod_proxy on Apache. Who cares? No one but me…
What this means is that I should now be able to move this site (mostly) to Apache on OpenBSD, which will simplify some things (like the Gallery), while still allowing me to host portions of the site (transparently, thanks to mod_proxy) on Windows and IIS, so that I can keep playing with ASP.NET. In other words, I get the best of both worlds, all with a single (Dynamic!) IP.
What this means for people looking at the site is that they *shouldn’t* notice any changes - at least no changes resulting strictly from adding Apache to the mix - since key apps like Movable Type and Gallery will run on either platform. But it’s *easier* to run them on *nix/Apache than on Windows/IIS, so I should spend less time tweaking scripts and settings to get things to work.

I finally figured out why Movable Type wasn’t sending me any e-mail notifications - after wasting entirely too much time trying to figure out what was wrong with MT, I realized that it was all actually a problem with the way SMTP and DNS were configured on my server.

So, now that all is pretty much happy-happy in MT, I’m thinking of rebuilding the site around the fairly impressive Tiki platform. But I actually want to keep using MT for my blogging, and so I have to see if Tiki and MT can play nicely together first. I don’t see why not…

My friend Joe just got back from Hawaii the night before last, and came over for Man Night last night, and already has his trip photos online. I’ve been back from Japan for ages, and still haven’t uploaded mine to the DanRochman.com - Online Photo Gallerygallery. I am shamed, and have a renewed determination to get them online tonight.

So I tried to update the site to use the 3-column template from Blogstyles, but it blew something up and I got everything but the main “entries” section of the page. Which is pretty nasty… I didn’t have time to troubleshoot it, so I switched back to the default MT templates - but the problem persisted! Now THAT’S weird. I’ve rebuilt the entire site a few times, and double-checked the templates, but no luck so far. Maybe this new entry will put things right. Otherwise I might have to really get my hands dirty. Metaphorically, of course. Sigh.
[Update: This post is up - that DID fix it, somehow! Ahhh.]

Thanks (mostly) to the wonderful web app known simply as Gallery, I now have a Photo Gallery up on this site! I’ve actually had the Gallery app running on a test box for a little while, just experimenting with it, so there are just some older albums up right now. But I’m now ready to start uploading new photos. Well, almost ready - my digital camera (Olympus E-100RS) is in the shop. In the meantime, I intend to create a sub-gallery of pics taken with my bizarre little SiPix StyleCam Blink, or maybe still captured from my DV camcorder. Whatever - having Gallery up is half the battle. And now to bed.

More thanks to Chris P. - I just created and added my very own (growing) Blogroll. I even used PHP to include the blogroll info, so I feel particularly geeky (but in a good way). I’m okay with JavaScript in some cases, but having content depend on it is against my religion. To give you an idea, I test my sites in Lynx.

For those that don’t know, a Blogroll is a list of blogs that you visit (somewhat) regularly. The idea being that if you like what you see here, and I like what I see there, then by extension (drumroll) you might like what you’d see there, too.

So go ahead and check them out. Also check out blogrolling.com, which powers the list. I’ll be adding more as time allows, but for now I’ve got (real) work to do.

Waddayaknow? It really *is* that easy to get MovableType up and running…
Special thanks to Chris “Lockergnome” Pirillo, who inspired me (I’m *that* “blogger-wannabe”) to actually “go home and do it” - albeit not in those words. I can almost *FEEL* my personal and professional lives flourishing! Well, maybe not quite yet - but there is a tingling sensation…

Next up (tomorrow): some real content, a photo gallery, some non-default templates and style sheets, and at least one Call to Action!

[Thanks, Chris. It *was* easy, but it's also easy to find reasons *not* to do things. I owe you some Peet's.]