Meta: August 2003 Archives

You might already have noticed it: I added some advertisements to this site. Since now I am paying a hosting provider to host this site, I thought that I might try to get back at least some of the money I spend for it. The advertisements are related to the contents of the page, so I only added them the pages of the individual items. This makes the chance bigger that they may actually be useful for my visitors as well. I decided to give it a try for about two months; if I notice at that moment that they are not working, I will remove them.

People using a modern browser won't see the advertisements, since the advertisement script does not work when the page is processed ad XML.

When I designed this site, I of course tested the layout on my Windows computer. I know that it looks alright with IE6 and Mozilla, and I suspect that it looks acceptable in most other OS/browser combinations. If I would be a professional designer, I would run it through the famous BrowserCam, but my little site is not worth the money.

Of course there are some emulators available, which might give you an idea of how your site looks --- but remember that if something looks wrong you never know for sure whether it is your code or the emulator. A new emulator I found today, shows how this site looks on an iPaq PDA.

Mmmm. Header to big, no skip navigation link, useless side column, font too big, ... But still readable. I also loaded the Fimcap site, which still has a tables based layout, and that looked way worse. To read the text you have to keep on scrolling.

I guess I will have to make a new stylesheet, or maybe serve PDA's the print stylesheet. But the print stylesheet removes all the navigational elements... Anyway, the coming days I will tweak this site so it will look better for my mobile readers --- do I have any?

I have written before about the Movable Type plug-ins I use for this site; at this moment I am using seven different plug-ins. The more plug-ins you use, the more difficult it becomes to maintain the site. Because once in a while new versions appear, and I don't want to scan seven (eight if you include MT itself) sites to see if updates are available.

But now there is the MT Plug-ins Manager. I downloaded the files, placed them on the server and fired up the page. A neat list with all available plug-ins appeared.

Since I didn't install my plug-ins with this tool, the plug-in manager did not know yet which plug-ins I already have installed. So I went to the Manual Registration section, where I could specify the version number and plug-in name of each file in my plugins directory. After entering these details I went back to my main page, and noticed an update button next to the IfEmpty plug-in. I was using version 1.1, while the latest version is 1.11. I clicked the button, waited some seconds and my plug-in was updated. This is great!!! No more downloading from different sites, unzipping, FTP-ing,... One click on the button does the job.

I am having some problems in the comment form of my individual archives.

After entering a comment, the form correctly sets the mtcmtauth, mtcmtmail and mtcmthome cookies.

But if I view the page later, the contents of these cookies are not loaded into their respective fields (I've tried it with Moz and IE6). My browser tells me that document.comments_form.email is zero or not an object. Of course I checked my template, but I cannot find anything strange. The <form> tag element has id="comments_form", and the field is also nicely called email.

I don't know where to look further anymore. Can somebody have a look at this page, and help me with the solution?

Some of you receive a message whenever I update this site. You can become a member of my update list by filling in your details on the form on my first page. I am using an external service (Bloglet) to handle these messages.

But now that I have my new provider, I am taking things in my own hands again. I have created a MailMan mailing list to which I will add all people receiving messages . At this moment I am still testing --- in fact, this post is a test to see whether the notifications arrive to the list --- and as soon as everything works, I will change the form on my site, so new subscription will automatically be added to the list.

Movable Type supports a notification list, but has no mechanism to manage this list. I will have to add, remove and change all addresses by hand, and since I am lazy I looked for a way to automate this. So now the only e-mail address in the MT notification list is the mailing list address. After that, MailMan will take care about distributing the message to all interested persons. MailMan also provides a management interface where the recipients of my messages can configure their accounts.

[Update 12.08.2003] The test performed by this message worked flawlessly, so I deleted the Bloglet service and replaced the subscription form by a MailMan form. In the mean time I was able to help some other people setting up MailMan for their subscriptions by pointing them to the FAQ How do I create a newsletter/announcement/one-way list?.

It has been three days ago since I switched my site to the new server. Little by little the visitors switched as DNS servers synchronised all over the world. And little by little I noticed some problems on my site.

These problems were related the two changes I made in the set-up of my site: I moved my photo gallery from its subdirectory /photos to its own sub-domain photos.braintags.com and I changed all URLs of the individual archives from entry_name.html to entry_name/index.shtml.

The first change broke all links to the photos --- and what is a photo gallery without photos? --- which I corrected by editing all 51 entries. Furthermore I still have to create a symbolic link to some files from my main site, like robots.txt.

The second change broke nothing on my site, but some links to my pages on other sites (Google!) broke terribly. Therefore I decided to us my good friend mod_rewrite to serve people the right page. All I had to do was to create a rule to redirect requests for /archives/yyyy/mm/entry_name.html to /archives/yyyy/mm/entry_name/. So I created the following rule:

# Redirect old URI's to future-proof directories
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule (archives/[0-9]{4}/[0-9]{2}/.*)\.html$ $1/ [R=permanent]

This did a good job, except for two problems: it also redirected the URI of my monthly archives to archives/yyyy/mm/index/ and it added a slash in front of the URI, so the URL would look like http://jeroensangers.com//archives/.... The first problem was easily solved:

# Redirect old URI's to future-proof directories
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !index.s?html$
RewriteRule (archives/[0-9]{4}/[0-9]{2}/.*)\.html$ $1/ [R=permanent]

For the second problem I am still looking for a solution.

Welcome!

If you're reading this message, the server transfer was successfully finished. Exporting and importing all entries went without problems. Within 15 minutes I had copied all my texts to the new server. For sure there are some broken links (the coming period I am going to make them future-proof), but I will fix that the coming days.

Now all I have to do is wait until the DNS settings have been copied to all DNS servers over the world, and ask my old provider to drop jeroensangers.com.

Change of plans...

Yesterday I told that I was going to redesign my templates and style before switching to the new hosting provider. After one day of design work, I realise that I want so many changes that the rewrite is going to take weeks. The style I was using until now was based on the default templates of Movable Type, which I adapted by adding and deleting some things, until it looked almost like what I wanted. What I am doing now, is starting with an empty file and adding one by one the elements I want to see. This is a slowly process, since I cannot spend the whole day working on this --- I wish I could!

So now I decided that I am going to copy everything as it is now to the new location, and continue the rewrite on the background. Therefore I disabled comments on the most popular entries (to disable comments on all entries I need to edit them one-by-one. There is a script that can do this, but is requires PHP and MySQL, two of the reasons I am switching to another provider). Now I have to copy the templates and do an export and import of the data. If everything works well, you will read the next message from the new server.

After I purchased an account for this site last weekend, I have been exploring the possibilities and planning how to switch my site to the new server. I prefer to think a little bit before I start copying recklessly.

The thing that took most of my time is making choices, since I have now so many more options than I had before. For example, I have three options to access my e-mail with a web client (NeoMail, horde or SquirrelMail), and three options to analyse the access statistics (AWStats, webalizer, Urchin). Besides making choices, I have been experimenting on setting up a mailing list for the notifications, created a subdomain for my photo gallery, blocked some IP addresses, activated SpamAssasin on my e-mail, ... All these options are comfortably available through cPanel, something I have never seen before, but which I liked immediately.

Of course I started installing Movable Type, this time using a MySQL database to store all the information. This gave me also the opportunity to play a little bit with MySQL. After setting up MT, I configured my three weblogs (Braintags, Braintags Gallery and Braintags Static Content), but did not yet copy the style sheets. I want to use this site conversion to update all my templates and styles. I am thinking about using a three-column layout for my main page, since the current sidebar is too long. Besides that I want to integrate my photo gallery by using a likewise style. So the next week I will be playing HTML-Kit and TopStyle Pro. Once this is done, I will export and import all the date and change the DNS record so you all can see the new site (without pop-up banners!!).

FOAF provides an execellent vocabulary for describing people and the relation between people. It is a way to describe yourself -- your name, email address, and the people you're friends with -- using XML and RDF. This allows software to process these descriptions, perhaps as part of an automated search engine, to discover information about your and the communities of which you're a member.

Of course I created a FOAF description of myself, using the FOAF-a-Matic. You can find my FOAF at http://braintags.com/foaf.rdf. If you link your FOAF to mine, please let me know, so I can update my file.

[Update 03.08.2003]: After seeing 23 404-errors in my logfile, I came to the conclusion that I must have saved the FOAF file with the wrong name. It is now fixed, so it should work alright.

For those people who are too lazy to look into the file, my FOAF description looks as follows:

<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
    xmlns:rdfs="http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#"
    xmlns:foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/">
  <foaf:Person>
    <foaf:name>Jeroen Sangers</foaf:name>
    <foaf:title>Mr</foaf:title>
    <foaf:firstName>Jeroen</foaf:firstName>
    <foaf:surname>Sangers</foaf:surname>
    <foaf:nick>Beltza</foaf:nick>
    <foaf:mbox_sha1sum>6fe5a1c9a2f3ce9d6a53d4f82d0e4a92254bba2b</foaf:mbox_sha1sum>
    <foaf:homepage rdf:resource="http://braintags.com/"/>
    <foaf:phone rdf:resource="tel:+34-6-19204630"/>
    <foaf:workplaceHomepage rdf:resource="http://www.icg.es/"/>
    <foaf:schoolHomepage rdf:resource="http://www.uu.nl/"/>
  </foaf:Person>
</rdf:RDF>

I don't notice the pop-up advertisements on this site anymore, since the browsers I am normally using (Mozilla & Firebird) block them, but I know that they irritate quite some visitors of this site. But as they say: you get what you pay for. I pay nothing for hosting this site, and in return I'll have to accept that my provider adds these horrible things to my pages. :-(

But I have good news for you: today I arranged a new hosting provider, and since I am paying a little bit, they will host my site banner free!!!!!!. I could have upgraded my current account, but I have found a provider who gives me a lot more for less!!! Here are the specs:

• 75mb disk space
• 5gb/month bandwidth
• Unlimited e-mail accounts
• Unlimited FTP accounts
• Unlimited MySQL 4 databases
• Unlimited subdomains
• 4 mailing lists
• One domain
• PHP 4.3.1
• CGI-Bin (Perl)
• POP3, SMTP, IMAP, & Webmail
• Unlimited e-mail forwarders
• Unlimited autoresponders
• crontab
• ...

For me, the biggest advancements are the MySQL database, unlimited POP3 boxes and PHP. I don't know anything about PHP, but I have seen a lot of handy code that I would like to copy & paste in my templates. Another benefit is that without the banner code, my pages will contain valid XHTML 1.1 code.

For the coming period, I'm afraid that I will still serve my site from the old location with pop-ups, since I want to set up the new server really, really good, and like to fix some design flaws in the current site.

Be patient, dear visitors