My various websites have been off line this weekend. And so have I…no EverQuest 2 for me, and no logging in to the office to do my work.
Category Archives: Site news
Blogging about blogging
Semi-annual hacking…
This server has been down more or less continuously for the last 24 hours. It was all part of the semi-annual celebration known as “Hack Day”, which is always accompanied by games such as “Whack a Hacker” and “Patch Roulette”.
A few more site theme “niggles” fixed…
As I have mentioned before, I am using a slightly modified version of a theme from Ensellitis here.
Slashdot changed their RSS feed URL and never told me!
Sigh…
I just spent nearly two hours figuring out that Slashdot has changed the URL of their RSS feed. Their old RSS feed URL (http://slashdot.org/slashdot.rdf) generates a 301 “Moved Permanently” HTTP error. If you are using a browser, this will redirect you automatically to the redirect URL, which is http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot/to.
Continue reading Slashdot changed their RSS feed URL and never told me!
Yay for Google!
Google is supposedly about to start providing RSS feeds of their Google News headlines.
That’s great, and I guess I’ll have to switch over from using my own Google feed scraper program. Its been working pretty well for the last few months, but maintaining it has always been a bit of a pain. That said, I was also somewhat proud of the fact that it *did* work, and that it allowed me to have Google News on my site when other folks didn’t have this feature.
Its purdy…
I think I’ve pretty much finished this round of site design updates.
The key things I added/changed:
- The overall theme: the main text block is now “flexible” in size, and that was the main thing I wanted. The theme I picked, the Ensellitis theme by Chris Ensell, was just about perfect. I made some very minor changes, altering a few elements of the left block and link colours and such. I don’t know why there aren’t more of these “free flow” templates- how many website visitors come to a site at 800×600? And frankly, my posts are too dang long to look “right” when scrunched down to 40 characters wide or so
- I’ve added a “most recent comments” section at the left
- I updated my banner image, adding a picture of Sadie in the process
- and finally, I added a simple visitor stats block courtesy of Joe Cheung
I have seen the light
Per my previous post, I have been working on an updated format for this site for the last couple of days. I just finished spending about two hours trying to fix a formatting problem…and it turns out to be a bug with Internet Explorer.
Formatting…
Just in case you were poking around this site sometime between 11:00 PM Pacific and now (1:00 am)…my apologies.
I’ve been testing out different “themes” for Kelly’s World. I went through well over 150 of them at the WordPress Theme Viewer, looking for some specific features. Then I tried a few here on my site just to make see what that looked like.
Sorry, this Module is not active!
Sigh…try to do one little thing to fix a configuration problem, and a dozen bugs show up.
If you are a website admin and use PHPNuke, this might interest you. Many (?) Linux distributions are now shipping with a PHP configuration setting called “register_globals” set to “Off”. This is a good thing for security as described by the PHP documentation. Unfortunately, it seems that PHPNuke has a ton of places where globals are used “incorrectly”.
Dreaded favicon
Anyone who runs a website has undoubtedly seen it. Hundreds of errors in the logfiles saying “File does not exist: /../favicon.ico”
Years ago, someone in the browser world came up with this idea that it would be neat if each website could have a little icon that would represent that site. If it was named and placed in a standard location, browsers could pick up that image and use it if the user added the site as a favorite, for example. Its a neat idea.