Well, the design only took a couple of days actually.

Banner background came from the fine folks at stock.xchng.

Traffic sign graphics courtesy of trafficsigns.us:

• The “Scenic Area” sign was a perfect match for the Flickr module.
• A generic exit sign was good for the sideblog links.
• The “merging lanes” sign was appropriate for the category list (narrowing your view of the content here).
• And of course the historic highway sign for the monthly archive list.

I can sleep in peace now.

Posted at 3:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (1)

Posted at 3:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Well, let’s see how I fare these days…

Note that all sponsored links or pseudo-results (a constructed result like in the case of Lycos where other search options are given) are excluded.

Looks like I’m still the #1 “Brad Choate” on the web. Special kudos to Yahoo and Altavista for their efforts to bribe me away from using Google.

I gotta say, I’m amazed at the results above. There’s no better proof that blogs have serious impact on search engines. Sometimes this is a good thing. Sometimes it is not. I can easily attribute my ranking successes to my contributions to Movable Type. Lots and lots of people link to this little site to promote one thing or another I’ve made available. Those links do count and vote me up to a status I would probably never achieve otherwise. Thanks for your support, guys.

Perhaps an obvious factoid, but the “a9” of “a9.com” is a shorthand way to write “amazon.com”. “a” plus “mazon.com” (9 characters).

And also: at this time, it appears the WHOIS information for Amazon.com has been hacked, based on results from whois.verisign-grs.com: Correction: not hacked, just a silly extra entry in the DNS records. Not sure why WHOIS queries in this way, but it does. Thanks to Joseph for correcting me.

Posted at 9:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (8)

Looks like I’ve drunk the kool-aid. Yes, I’m sporting Google ads now. Well, sort of.

I’m trying this out, so please bear with me. I’ve rigged the ads to display if you’re coming from Google or some other search engine. So if the referring URL is a search engine, you see the ad, otherwise, you don’t (ie, if you come from a bookmark, or from a link in your RSS/Atom newsreader). The conditional placement is done via some referring URL sniffing (mt-refsearch is doing the heavy lifting).

But I may wind up turning that conditional off, if this is at all successful. Fair warning.

If you’re not seeing the ads, here’s what you do: search for something at Google (or your favorite search engine— except a9.com, for now) with “brad choate” as part of the query. Click on one of the links and you should see a page with the ads. If you want to remove them, just click on any of the site navigation links on the page and they go away.

I knew I had a reason for registering a .com domain!

I, for one, welcome our new Google overlords.

PS: Baby #3 is now 10 days overdue. Ahem. So please, take a moment and click a few of those ad links. I’ve got a gut feeling that college won’t be any cheaper 18 years from now. (Or in 16 years or 14 years.)

Posted at 11:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (3)

As a computer programmer and user, I prefer to see file extensions. If it’s a “.html” file, I know what that means and what kind of content that file contains. So I always enable the display of the extensions for the computers I use. But for the web, I’m doing my best to remove the extension for my web pages. At least, from the end user’s point of view. It’s called cruft. And it’s bad.

I’ve reconfigured my weblog so that each place it refers to a document, it strips off the “.php” extension. I did this using my Movable Type Regex plugin:

<$MTEntryLink regex="s/\.php$//"$>

Not terribly difficult to do, but there are a lot of places I have to do it. I think I have them all covered. RSS/Atom feeds, search results, etc. Now, I still have php as my filename extension for all the files produced from Movable Type— I want the files to have an extension within the filesystem. I’m more comfortable with it that way. But I rely on the MultiViews feature of Apache’s mod_negotation to serve up the right file when the extension itself is absent. This works very well, and allows any extension to be optional.¹

So all the links for my blog are published with links sans extensions. And yet, I still see people linking to my site with URLs ending in “.php”. Why is that?

Continue reading "Content-Dislocation" »

Posted at 9:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (13) | TrackBacks (9)

Update: sorry, no longer doing the hosting thing. Found a better way to go.

Posted at 9:04 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

There’s been some questions posed as to “how do you know who’s subscribing to your web site’s RSS feed?” Count the number of accesses to your index.xml file? Perhaps unique accesses by IP? Dave offered a solution for this, but Tim doesn’t think it’s quite what he’s looking for (I don’t think it is either).

Tim’s suggestion was to use the “Referer” [sic] “User-Agent” field of newsreaders to provide some kind of unique value on an individual level. Tim went on to describe how the newsreader would ask the user for their e-mail address and use that as the basis for a 64-bit hashcode (which would translate your email address into something that looks like this: 3a892d0a81224ff4). That hashcode value would be added to the referring URL User-Agent string when requesting the RSS feed.

It’s a simple and elegant solution to the problem. I hope all the newsreaders out there hop on it and make it a feature. The only problem with it is that you can’t expect it to give you an accurate count. Because some people won’t supply their email address for such a thing. Tim’s followup post on this topic includes comments from a very privacy-conscious individual (even though the hashcode could not be used to recover the original e-mail address — he just doesn’t want to be tracked/counted in any form or fashion). And there will also be newsreaders out there that may never implement this in the first place.

Please raise your hand

So in lieu of this being available in the newsreaders, let me try an old fashioned approach and just ask frankly: How many of you are reading out there? Please post a reply if you are: your name, e-mail address if you don’t mind (it won’t be displayed on this site), a web site address if you have one. And include your RSS feed link too — I figure if you’re taking the time to read my site, maybe I should be reading yours.

Update: Whoops. I entirely missed the portion of Tim’s updates regarding the improper use of the Referer header. I totally agree and also agree with Brent Simmons that this info is better suited for the User-Agent header.

Posted at 4:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (85) | TrackBacks (2)

Happy Matrix day! Oh — you thought it was releasing on 05-15? Well, I did too, but they are showing in some areas today. As early as 10 PM. I am so there. Or will be there tonight.

So to commemorate this momentous occasion (can you tell I’m a fan?), I’ve restyled my site. Very few things could move me to take such action, so you know my feelings are sincere. This movie had better not suck.

“Reload” is the key word today, so reload this page a few times and take note of the randomized Matrix quotes and background graphics for the content panel (with IE, you’ll have to scroll to the bottom of the page to see the background graphic. With Mozilla and Safari, it stays at the bottom of the screen like a good fixed attachment should).

Where’s the navigation? It’s on the upper-right side. Yes, that Flash thingy (assuming you have Flash and all that) is a mini-navigation control. I need to add some more visual cues at least, but it does work. From left to right, it reads brad, georgia, savannah, seth, the real world, archives, movies, games, the oracle and preferences. All other links and sidebar clutter have been banished from this template to keep you focused.

Once the new wears away, feel free to switch to any available style you’d like under the Preferences page (or click here to return to the previously default template).

And best of all — and thanks to Smarty — this redesign was done without having to press a “Rebuild” button of any kind.

Many thanks to Jesper for some CSS troubleshooting and the only person I know that has IE 5 handy. If anyone out there knows how to make the CSS even more consistent across all known browsers, please let me know.

Note: If you don’t see the Matrix theme I’ve applied, it may be due to your existing style preference for this site. Click here to set your style to the Matrix theme.

Update: Whew, didn’t suck. Except for the painfully abrupt ending. The whole theater moaned together in unison when it happened. I agree with Kottke that some of the CGI was less lifelike than advertised. You should stay after the credits roll for the Revolutions teaser. Oh and I won’t be adding any tool tips to my Matrix navigation thing — it should be cryptic looking. The font is a wee bit bigger now so it should be more readable.

Update: OK, we’re back to the regular theme now. Just hop over to preferences if you prefer to keep using the Matrix theme.

Posted at 1:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (17) | TrackBacks (6)

I’ve just installed ionCube’s PHP Accelerator. Installation was a snap and performance should be better. We’ll see. This is the solution that Yahoo! is using for their PHP stuff. And it’s free, too.

What do you think? Are the pages any snappier?

Continue reading "PHP Accelerator Installed" »

Posted at 3:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

• I’m dead.
  Feels for pulse. Nope!
• I had scampered off to SXSW to accept an award of some sort to prove once and for all that I’m better than you.
  Hah. I don’t need an award for that.
• I forgot to chmod 777 my web directory.
• I’ve been hard at work on MT-Textile 2.0 — the one that reads your mind and blogs for you.
• For homeland security reasons, I was relocated to a secure, undisclosed location.
• I just now finished digesting Apocalpyse 6.
  In actuality, I’m still working on it.
• I’ve been busy working on my own blogging software.
• Inspired by the drama of American Idol, I left to pursue my Hollywood dreams.
• Paralyzed by fear that adding anything more to my blog would only hurt my DayPop Blogrank score.
• I’ve been infected with an some alien life form that has taken control of my mind but I’ve resisted it’s desire for my Movable Type password.
  Preposterous. We are working together in complete cooperation. And I for one welcome our new parasitic overlords.

Seriously though, with the server migration and stuff at work, I’ve been busy.

Fortunately, the server migration is completely done. Maybe I can avoid that for another couple of years. The benefits? Much faster: you folks out there shouldn’t get timeouts from trackbacking to me; MT runs much better, even as a CGI; another 10 GB of space; an extra 450 GB of transfer a month (so feel free to hit refresh all you want); new RedHat with RedHat Network support (I ♥ up2date).

And just so I don’t get lots of email about #3… because I’m using suEXEC, my web directory permissions are actually 755.

Posted at 1:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (3)