Category: About this Blog

Today I looked at the stats of my blog. The most read article by far (461 hits) was this one. A really uninteresting entry about my wisdom tooth (BTW he is still happily where he belongs, in my mouth). The reason it is read so often are the two trackbacks i send to the MovableType Blog and Tima’s blog because of the MT licensing debate. Probably a lot of people wondered what my wisdom tooth has to do with the MT license. To make it clear, my teeth are not available under any license.
Second is the Wikipedia article (179 hits), where I also send a number of pings to popular blogs. The third one is the first article, who is read because of search engine hits, BSD and USB Webcams (91 hits).

Next Week a lot of Bloggers will visit Vienna. On Sunday BlogWalk 3.0, an invite-only gettogether and next week BlogTalk 2.0 the official conference. Check the wiki if you plan to attend.
I will not attend, as it is not very likely that someone donates me a 60 Euro-ticket for the conference.

Today someone dumped half of the fortunefile into my blog, so i decided to do some basic spam fighting. I renamed mt-comments.cgi and forced preview of comments. I did not yet install the MT-Blacklist plugin and there are some other strategies to fight spam.

If you can read this, the blog was successfully migrated to another server running apache 2.0.
Yeah, it looks like you can. I think I have fixed everything, but if you find a broken link, please report.
The upgrading took of course longer than planned, Although the apache config of 2.0 is similar to 1.3, the default configuration changed in some subtle ways, e.g. the automatic display of README files does not work anymore per default and the php4-Module does not automatical register the .php extension.
And although this website is only the blog, it already requires a dozen perl modules installed and several ugly php scripts with absolute paths etc.

New Blog Feature: “Most commented Entries” from Scriptygoddess. This is something I always wanted, because now the most popular entries are listed on the index page. Unfortunately the sidebar is now too bloated for my ADSL line. I am currently trying to move my Blogroll to a seperate page.

You have probably read about the bad persistence of the web. Today I noticed by chance two dead links in my blog, and fixed them.
I don’t really want to run after dead links in my blog, as there must be 100s of external links already, of which i guess at least 10 are already broken. And if i start to reedit my blog entries, I am tempted to rewrite them.
So I will leave them broken as historic relicts in future. Maybe I should try to avoid linking and copy the relevant texts (where possible without danger of copyright infringements) into the entry.

After blogging breaks I always miss a feature in MT. I like to have both elements of my blog index page, the sidebar, and the articles aligned at the bottom. The only way I can do this is by manipulating the “Show articles of the last n days” option in the MT configuration, which is not really handy. What I would like to have is an option like “Show as many articles that fit into n pixel”.
But of course I know HTML is not a Layout System but a Markup Language so I probably will dream forever of this feature.

At the moment, the W3C Validator says this page is valid XHTML.

There were several bugs in the rssfetch code, Like not encoding & in URLs or targets with spaces. Time to bump the minor version to 0.2.3

I have not added the button to the sidebar, because this blog is changing too quick, and not all changes are under my control (e.g. comments, rssfeeds).
I made a survey on the blogs of my blogroll, that carry the “valid xhtml” button:

• http://anorganic.org/ not valid
• http://synflood.at/blog/ not valid
• http://cngw.org/ not valid

(Did I already say that b2 sucks?)
The only exception was “The Aardvark Speaks”, which validated. Congratulation Horst.

Another new item was added to the sidebar. Now I finally have a “Recent Comments” section. I wanted this, because today I got a comment to an older entry. I removed the “Recent Entries” section, because the sidebar was too long, and I never understood why this is needed, the recent entries are already on the right.
A great resource for extending your MT Blog is the MT Wiki, but the example code for “Recent Comments” was wrong, it was a “Recent Comments to Recent Entries” algorithm. Luckily I found a different approach on another blog
BTW, I am not quite sure, if these boxes get updated, if i post a comment, or if i have add a cronjob for automatic rebuilds. I will have to test this.
Now why is this title “Boxes or No Boxes”. I first added the black boxes around external content. Do you think I should add the black boxes to the other sections too, or do you think they are ugly and should be removed? I am currently tending to ugly, but my mood has changed several times today.
My Word of the day is: Tag Soup

Installed another MT-plugin today, that displays the top comment posters.
At the moment the numbers aren’t impressing, but perhaps the stats encourage people to write more comments.
While I am already writing a blog entry, I would like to point to grog’s ebay auction, where he is selling his beard. A bargain for all wannabe BSD hackers.