vanderwal.net

That Syncing Feeling Pages Updated

The links to That Syncing Feeling have been corrected as I now have steady connectivity again. I have also posted the PDF version, for whomever finds that helpful.

Ninth Anniversary for My Personal Site

At some point nine years ago I began my first personal site. It was November 1995 and CompuServ opened up space for their users to publish their own site. This trek began with creating a page using a text browser and some prefab components from CompuServ. The computer this adventure began with is long gone. But, the remnants of the site remain, mostly in the links page, which became my bookmarks that I could access from anywhere. I never really went back to using browser based bookmarks after this point.

My personal site has changed over the years, from a site that was named the "Growing Place" that housed poetry, links, a snippet about consulting work I was doing, and a homepage. Version 2 was a move off of CompuServ to Clark.net hosting (which became Verio and was never the same after) came with frames and FrontPage buttons (the buttons never worked right after they were edited) and the links page grew and the consulting page moved from active to "under construction". V.2 also had some CGI form pages, mostly for mail and a guestbook that was not linked.

Version 3 (about 1998) was a move to vanderwal.net and had a black background with electric green and electric blue text. V.3 provided more links and had a small page of annotated links that was updated infrequently, and was mostly short notes to myself and was not linked to by anything but referrer logs. V.3 began using ColdFusion and then ASP, as that was what I was playing with at the time. This version was hosted at Interland, which was not a favorite ISP as I was doing bug fixing for them and their poor system administration.

Version 4 (November 2000) was moved to an ISP with PHP. This was just after our wedding and a photo gallery was born. The site stayed in black with blue and green for a short while, until it moved to a blue and orange theme (April 2001) inspired by the trip to the mother country Holland on our honeymoon. The annotated links were still being kept by hand, but were linked to finally. December 2000 I started using Blogger, which made the annotated links easier and provided a spark to post other information.

We are still in Version 4, possibly in version 5 as the graphic design morphed in November 2003 to its current state. This design validated to XHTML and made maintenance much easier. Off the Top weblog was converted to PHP in October 2001 after leaving Blogger and hand maintaining this section for months. The hosting has remained the same and has been steady.

There are many things in the works, but other outside commitments have been putting things on hold. The markup and CSS need to be cleaned up for greater ease. There are some hosting modifications coming, which could trigger some more changes on the back end programming side. There are some design and presentational structure changes that are being played with as there are a few things that really bug me. I really want the comments back online and I have plan for this, but it needs some time to work out the details. There are some changes external to this site that could be coming also, which will make things much easier in the long run. Maybe these revisions will be done by the 10th anniversary.

Quick Links are Now Pulled from del.icio.us

We did a little house keeping today. We have been using our del.icio.us link tool as a replacement for the Quick Links. Today the Quick Links are pulled from del.icio.us. We found that as we came across helpful links through out the day del.icio.us made it easy to add links and information. The del.icio.us tool also has made it easy to find similar information.

We extracted the vanderwal del.icio.us links from del.icio.us using their del.icio.us API and formated the information in a very similar manner to what was displayed in the Quick Links previously in the side bar. The del.icio.us Web Service is wonderful to work with and made this task possible.

We are hoping that over the weekend we will put up a page of all the previous Quick Links. We have it in our plans to add all the entries on this site into del.icio.us directly using this site's categories. The del.icio.us flat category structure is similar what we built here in 2001. The categories between this site and what we keep at del.icio.us do not synch so we do not have the categories from del.icio.us stored here. There is always something more to do.

We are also considering moving the quick links out of the side bar and place them in the main content area in a grouping. This will take some thinking. If you have ideas on this front please contact us.

Jerks

Comments here are closed for the time being. All past comments are still online, but posting new comments is closed.

Yes, some jerk (far less caustic term than what these people really are, as there are kids around) decided to flood the comments with porn spam and other garbage. We have the IP address of the fool (who most likely had their computer hacked, at least this time it is not a military related IP, which is what many have been in the last three months that have been dumping the porn spam referals).

One thing about writing ones own blog software has been missing out on the flood of this garbage that those using the "off-the-shelf" tools have been dealing with the past year or so. This type of thing is one reason I have not moved this site to an already made blog tool, the other is I have features I have been working for this site that I have not found in other tools and they are things that I want. I know I am not greatly adding back to the community, but my time is horribly sporadic and I fit in work on the site tools when I can.

It looks like I may move to Typekey as a means to stop the comment spam. I may also upgrade the comment area when the comments return, so that HTML is not needed. It will take time, which is one thing I am very short on right now.

vanderwal.net RSS Feeds now Optimized and aggregated by FeedBurner

We are now providing a consolidated feed of the main blog RSS feed, our vanderwal del.icio.us feed, and vanderwal Flickr feed in one vanderwal.net Feedburner feed. You ask about the feed of our Quick Links? Currently, it is not included in the Feedburner feed, but we have optimized that active feed with Feedburner also at, vanderwal.net Quick Link FeedBurner feed.

If you like the feeds the way you have been getting them you can still do so. Lately the Quick Link and del.icio.us feeds are being updated more frequently as they take much less time to post to. These are just snippets of things I am interested in coming back to or have found of interest and have not found the time for a full blog entry.

We are considering replacing the Quick Links with our del.icio.us feed at some point in the not too distant future. Tell us what you think.

Fixing Permalink to Mean Something

This has been a very busy week and this weekend it continues with the same. But, I took two minutes to see if I could solve a tiny problem bugging me. I get links to the main blog, Off the Top, from outside search engines and aggregators (Technorati, etc.) that are referencing content in specific entries, but not all of those entries live on the ever-changing blog home page. All of the entries had the same link to their permanant location. The dumb thing was every link to their permanant home was named the same damn thing, "permalink". Google and other search engines use the information in the link name to give value to the page being linked to. Did I help the cause? No.

So now every permanent link states "permalink for: incert entry title". I am hoping this will help solve the problem. I will modify the other pages most likely next week sometime (it is only a two minute fix) as I am toast.

Highlighting Text in IE 6 Now Available Here

Thanks to a heads up from Nick, we have modified our site so that it will allow highlighting text so it can be copied and pasted. All browsers allowed this highlighting functionality, except for IE 6 on Windows, which had a bug that blocked proper functionality.

It took a little bit of digging to sort out the problem. The problem was a result of using absolute positioning in the CSS. Once we changed the positioning from absolute to static everything was fine. Fortunately, we did not need to be using absolute for layout as this was the wrapper for the main content under the menu. This is a foolish bug to have in a browser and to have go unfixed (although minor compared to the severe security holes that are pervasive in the same browser).

Now our content here can be highlighted in all modern browsers to ease reading or copy and pasting. This important so that we may help others grab information for their Personal InfoCloud and reuse the information to help purposes.

Tweaking the Botox Pixels

We have made some minor tweaks to the presentation of the site. The menu bar has had the underlining removed on hover. Each of the items in the menu now has borders that change with hover and selection to create a little cleaner look.

The date bar in the weblog has been padded and has a slight border to off set it from the page and make the date more readable, the date has bugged me for a long time.

The permalink (comments) page now has a title of the entry. The entry titles have been added to the monthly archive pages also.

Lastly, the link to the Quick Link RSS feed has been added next to the Quick link title. This should make it easier to follow those links, should you wish. The Quick Links get updated far more regularly of late and there are some good gems that get nestled in there.

Quick Link RSS Feed

We have added a Quick Link RSS Feed for this site. It is also available from the vanderwal.net XML page. Yes, the plethora of links there today are related to testing, well at least some of them.

Blogspot Blocked

The past few weeks the porn referrer span has gotten completely out of hand. I do not care about Janet's, Britteny's, Paris', etc anatomy nor some island. This past week I set up a referrer block list with about 20 items. By Tuesday it was up to 45 items. Each day the junk referrers was growing by 5 with modifications of the site URLs. Well everything but one chunk of information changed, which is blogspot. It seems it is so bloody easy to throw some horrible site up that only aims at providing a means to collect ad money, microcent by microcent.

Since blogspot does not host anything of value I have read in so long and I do not know any soul that has a blogspot site they are all blocked. That is right all blogspot sites are blocked if vanderwal.net sees a blogspot site as a referrer.

New Content Area at Off the Top

There have been a few additions to Off the Top this weekend. The most noticeable is the Quick Links in the side bar. The Quick Links are just links to check out and will be posted when I either have nothing to say about them or I do not have time to post much else. The links have categories associated with them and may be pulled into a global category page at some point in the not too distant future. I have built the whole of my admin tools so that they are quite usable from a mobile device.

The other addition is just one for me, a comment tracking tool. This may get further expanded into a tool you can see and use, but for now I just needed a way to aggregate all the comments into one interface.

There are a couple other large modifications coming in the near future. I have set and tweaked the databases, now it is just getting the time to code and test.

There are times when I think I am going to move the site to Movable Type or some other tool, but I have fun building and tweaking my own tool. I get to see the tools built and integrated how I can best use them. I do have a few side endeavors that use TypePad as they are somewhat separate from the things done here and the limitations (although few) still bug me.

Headers for everybody

I am trying out visual enhancements on the Off the Top weblog display. I have added the header titles for each of the entries, which I have wanted to do for a long time. This should make the page easier to scan for information.

I have used the dark blue color for the type and given it shading in the CSS to offset the header from the date. Once the headers were added the dates were lost on the page, so I have given the pale orange background color to break up the page a little more. The pale orange background also seems to help the reader scan the page more easily.

Depending on feedback I may keep this and add it to the other multiple entry pages in Off the Top.

Site clean-up and other bits

Yes, we have done a little house keeping here by updating the links, fixing some of the "Previous Month" links in this section, fixing more non-standards snippets that have remained a bee in my bonnet (more still remain), and creating more continuity in the presentation layer. It is a continual update of design and development of the application that runs the site, but that is what makes it fun. I have been planning some of these fixes for months, but other things cropped up. I am trying to get many of these things done, as well as a long list of other items, before the baby arrives.

Yesterday's diversion was baby CPR class and baby safety, a power outage, trying to track down the contractor who was supposed to have been at the house all day finishing fixing the gutters, roof, and putting storm windows back on (along with a long list of other half done tasks).

Today I woke to a dead car battery and a dead PC. The car had a light that had been left on. The PC seems to have had the power supply die. Joy has been working on some stationary for the kid and printing cards for a small gathering at her sister's and needed to finish printing out the final cards today. I have only been using the PC for playing some older games and syching my Palm to applications that I have not ported or others have not ported to Mac as of yet. I got the car jump started by myself and ran the PC to the shop, it may become a Linux box in the near future, if Joy gets a new PC for work. I am also considering the G5 for a desktop in the Fall or Winter.

Mobile edition added

We have added a mobile edition of Off the Top capturing the last 10 entries. This should work well on nearly all mobile devices, including PDAs. The entries are provided in plain XHTML and do not have categories nor comments.

Let us know how this works for you.

Photo galleries from September 2001

September 2001 was wonderful and a little hectic, to say the least. Hence, I have just posted three new galleries of photos from my trip to San Francisco in September 2001. Posted are People, Places & Things, Flowers, and Architecture. These are some of the 450 pictures taken on that trip. The galleries will get a little more tweaking to improve browsing structures, but they are there to enjoy.

This process of posting was eased as I finally turned on the Windows file sharing in Mac OS X, which even works with XP Home. I can now view the directories on my TiBook from the PC. This allowed me the ability to pull files to the PC and build Adobe Photo Shop Web photo galleries from them. I have build the photo libraries on the Mac using iPhoto, but the PS galleries are one of my favorites for layout (not for accessability nor standards compliant). This solution will work until I move Photo Shop to the Mac with version 8.