Category Archives: Geek Stuff

Geek, geek and more geek.

Site updates

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Page Caching

I’ve made some minor changes to the blog over the last few days. Firstly, I’ve been using Ricardo Galli’s WP-Cache 2.0 plugin. This is an efficient WordPress page caching system. It should make the site much faster and responsive. WP-Cache started life as the “Staticize Reloaded” by matt and billzeller. I like the fact that it automatically invalidates the appropriate cache files when you publish a post or page or comment.

It also allows you to have portions of you page remain dynamic. This is fantastic. I needed my page counter to remain dynamic in order to be accurate.

Random Gallery Image

Someone kindly pointed out that clicking on the random Gallery image in the side bar was opening up the gallery in the tiny little iframe still in the sidebar. Not very useful that. I remembered that I could include the random image directly in the sidebar, but that the code wasn’t XHTML compatible. With the caching plugin it would also mean that the image would stop being random.

For my second tweak I ended up having to do a couple of things. One was to hack the Gallery code to produce valid XHTML. Unfortunately the dynamic part of the caching code which allows you to include a php file assumes that it needs to prepend ABSPATH to the include. That’s not the case for the random gallery image. So the last task was to tweak the dynamic part of the caching plugin so that I could include my gallery random image code from an http url.

Update 21/07/2005: I’ve submitted a trac ticket with a patch against the latest revision to implement this.

Speed up

I hope these changes help the site to run faster. It had been slowing down again. This was due to too many externally generated content in the sidebars. This is all cached now so things should be much quicker.

Google Moon

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On July 20, 1969, man first landed on the Moon… Those clever folks over at Google have just launched Google Moon in honour of that day. Google have added lunar images to their Google Maps interface and added in some significant locations.

In honor of the first manned Moon landing, which took place on July 20, 1969, we’ve added some NASA imagery to the Google Maps interface to help you pay your own visit to our celestial neighbor. Happy lunar surfing.

Oh, and don’t forget to zoom in all the way to get the really close detail!

Too many 404’s

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I use a custom 404 page on this site which emails me a notification whenever a bad request for a page is made. Over the last five days I’ve received in excess of 15,000 of these 404 emails. Oh dear!

This system has been pretty useful for spotting mistakes, mine and other peoples. If I include a wrong link in a post, I soon start getting 404 emails. I can quickly correct the issue. If someone else has a bad link to me, the email includes the referer (sic) field, so I can quickly trace the problem. Great stuff! It’s been working fine for ages.

Then, a few days ago, I notice a lot (a few hundred) of 404 emails in the Gmail folder they are automatically shunted to. I glanced through them and noticed that they looked like permanent links to my old blog url .../b2/archives/p/1234... that had been somehow corrupted into .../journalized//p/1234/.... I also noticed that it was Yahoo’s search engine web crawler. I moved one back to my Gmail inbox and popped a star on there to remind me to look into it.

So here I am today looking into it. I still hadn’t realized there were more than a few hundred! It was only when I fired up Thunderbird to clear out my POP3 mailboxes, that I saw some 20,000 emails waiting to download!

A fairly quick investigation revealed that my old b2 redirect script was still in place. But when I changed some code around and added some debug to it, I got nothing. Ah ha! I vaguely remembered fiddling with redirects in my .htaccess file the other day. I quickly spotted the culprit and commented out the line. Yay! instantly fixed.

I’d been trying to short circuit the PHP redirect code with the quicker apache redirect for the simplest case with the following line: Redirect Permanent /b2/archives https://journalized.zed1.com/ There are so many regular expression RedirectMatch lines in there that I forgot that that line would retain the rest of the URL when redirecting. You can even see where the extra slash came from!

Lesson learned: When making a change like this don’t just check it works, check that the other stuff isn’t broken!

The Beeb Shall Inherit the Earth

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Cory Doctorow claims The Beeb Shall Inherit the Earth over at Wired News. It’s a pretty good article talking about some of the things the BBC has been doing to open up its content to its audience.

America’s entertainment industry is committing slow, spectacular suicide, while one of Europe’s biggest broadcasters — the BBC — is rushing headlong to the future, embracing innovation rather than fighting it.

Unlike Hollywood, the BBC is eager and willing to work with a burgeoning group of content providers whose interests are aligned with its own: its audience.

I am full of admiration for the pioneers working there. Whilst I know they haven’t yet gone all the way with regards to Creative Commons licensing. They have been in close consultation with the UK and Scotland launches of the Creative Commons licensing process, and they have been working on some CC-like licensing, as well as getting clauses in the CC licences specifically addressing the BBC.

WordPress 1.5.1

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Hey! It looks like the new version of WordPress is out. There a summary of changes over at the WordPress Codex. In brief,

  • Login and feed fixes for IIS
  • Faster gettext i18n and Improved i18n string coverage
  • Extended ping support
  • Paging on the Manage->Posts page
  • URI-safe accent stripping for all UTF-8 characters in the Latin Extended-A Unicode block
  • Query string style argument list support for wp_get_links() and wp_get_linksbyname()
  • Improved hierarchy listing in wp_list_pages()
  • Support for a Status: theme header field
  • Improved caching and database query reduction
  • Plugins can now have multiple option pages
  • Many, many bug fixes

There’s a full list of bugs fixed over at the bug tracking server.

Google Marches On

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Speaking of Google…
I had noticed over the last couple of days that Google had started pre-fetching search results or rather, enabling your browser to do that. Of course this only works with newer browsers that support this feature (not Internet Explorer!). I see that the knee-jerk-reactionists over at slashdot are predicting death and disaster. Google (and Mozilla), of course, tell you exactly how to disable it should you wish to do so. Mozilla’s FAQ entry is on-line too.

I also noticed this morning that I am now using 246 MB (20%) of your 1243 1286 1289 1300 MB. on Gmail. That’s an unusual number! I wonder where that came from. It looks suspiciously like 1000MB more than the space I was using yesterday! Could they, would they, have simply added 1000MB to whatever storage everyone was already using? Presumably in response to Yahoo’s decision to provide 1GB of storage. But they’ve not doubled They are doubling it like some speculated.

Update: Weird! The space available keeps growing!

Update: As Serge points out in comments, The Gmail What’s new page now has info on this. They are doubling the storage. They’ve also announced the ‘richtext’ support I had noticed in the compose pane.

UPA North 2

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The second meeting of UPA North took place last night at Cafe Muse in the Manchester Museum. It wasn’t as well attended as the first meeting in January, but there were some familiar faces as well as some new; Hi Roy!.

I arrived early and grabbed myself a sandwich and coffee before wandering around to shake a few familiar hands and say ‘Hi’ to some new faces. People continued to drift in for the next half an hour or so.

Dave Hawdale kicked of the meeting giving us some interesting and occasionally amusing ‘internet’ related facts from recent news, before introducing the nights guest speaker: Louise Ferguson.

Louise introduced herself and her subject ‘Ethnography’. Her talk was very interesting, if a little rushed. It was clear she had a lot more to say on the subject than time allowed. I felt she could have got some of her points across more easily with concrete examples, but she seemed determined to skirt around job specifics and client details. Louise finished with a brief question and answer session.

After another ‘shameless self-promotion’ session (which I bottled again!), Dave gave a round-up and mentioned some ideas for the next couple of meetings. He is trying to arrange a couple of speakers on Accessibility which should be very interesting.

Afterwards a small group of us retired to Kro Bar where we all chatted about all kinds of stuff; from music and record collections, to the Semantic Web and social software, to museum exhibits, categorization, folksonomies, and more. Talking to Louise, it sounds like there are some interesting things afoot, UK-centered for a change.

I think everyone gained something positive from the night. Some useful contacts were made and even some tentative agreements made for the future.