crazed monkey

I have now upgraded this weblog to Blosxom 2.0 RC5. I found myself hacking up the Perl code in an older version to do precisely what some Blosxom 2 plugins have been able to do for some time. I have yet to use any plugins which would be obvious to readers of this weblog, however.

One change I did make was add a new template flavour so that individual weblog entries are rendered alone in their own page with the title of the post appearing in the title of the web page. The resulting URLs make much more sense than the original date-based ones. After all, when viewing the URL few will care when the post was made, but most will probably care what the post is about. A few Apache RewriteRule trickeries later, and nobody is the wiser. It will be interesting to see how having the title of a post in the title element of the HTML changes my Google ranking for certain searchin terms.

Speaking of using HTML properly, I wish I could lucidly explain how to make advantageous use of valid HTML without degenerating into a frothy, rabid mass spewing forth rants on semantic markup, the separation of content and style, and the importance of using proper names, titles and sensible URLs. Restructuring our company website so that it conforms to an HTML standard and makes use of semantic HTML should make it more accessible to search engines and so increase its search ranking. I routinely see this weblog rank higher than definitive web pages for certain search terms, so I must be doing something right. The trouble is, our web guy is of the DreamWeaver school, so I wouldn’t even know where to start. Perhaps when I have some spare time I will take a look at a couple of our existing HTML pages and see how they could be improved.

Posted on June 3rd, 2003 in meta, site - No Comments »

As far as Google searches go, I thought this weblog had seen it all: from searches for various pornography involving monkeys, to … well, more searches for obscure pornography. This latest one, however, tops them all, not necessarily for the content of the search phrase but more for the frequency of hits and the fact that this weblog is number one for that search result. The search phrase in question? Sex crazed Iraqi bitches.

That search phrase has appeared not once, not twice, not even three times, but eight times in the past two days, and not from one area, either. Those Iraqi women are a world-wide phenomenon with originating countries including the Netherlands, the United Arab Emirates, Finland, Italy, and Syria.

Why Syrians are searching for their neighbours is beyond me, but where nubile Iraqi nymphomaniacs can be found, Saddam Hussein can’t be far behind.

Posted on May 6th, 2003 in meta, site - No Comments »

I have been following my progress on BlogShares with some interest. However, my interest had been somewhat muted given that my market value peaked at $50 and has been rapidly falling towards zero. Inexplicably, my weblog reached its IPO point today, and so the interest mounts. I had thought that a weblog’s valuation was the sum total of the value of its incoming links. Barring a fluke link on a large weblog, it seemed as though my weblog was destined to remain in the doldrums. However, crazedmonkey.com is now public and I rate it a Strong Buy.

Update: If I had bothered to read BlogShares’ news for the 11th of April, I would have found out that claimed weblogs are valued at $1000 in addition to the total value of their incoming links. So if you would like your weblog to go public, claim it!

My posts have been infrequent as of late. Everyone seems to be “warblogging” and I’ve given up adding to the noise. I have been somewhat distressed at the “fiercely independent thought” on some of the more “conservative” weblogs I have been forcing myself to read. I am tempted to write a few words, but that would just be feeding the trolls. We’ll see.

Posted on April 14th, 2003 in meta, site - No Comments »

Dive Into Mark: In brief: All hail the Benevolent Goat Masters!

I put in my two cents about supporting the title attribute to allow authors to specify tooltips for everything (but especially images, links, and form elements). This is such a fundamental usability feature, I didn’t realize how much it mattered to me until I tried Safari and didn’t get them.

I didn’t realise that all HTML elements could contain a title attribute. From now on, titles for everything! I try to provide titles for all my image and link elements, where appropriate, but now I will try providing titles in even more places, such as code blocks, and possibly weblog entries and quotes. I’m drunk with the possibilities!

Posted on February 11th, 2003 in meta, site - No Comments »

I was initially against using Blosxom to generate static pages as it would have meant duplication of information on my harddrive. Why should I have countless HTML and RSS files in addition to the TXT versions of my weblog entries? I then thought that it would be nice to generate static pages which played nicely with HTTP HEAD and the If-Modified-Since header. I still didn’t want the space overhead when, chances are, people were only interested in conditional downloads of the HTML and RSS pages in the category directories. Why not do both static and dynamic downloads?

I have wiped out my older rewrite rules in my Apache configuration for this weblog in favour of the following monster rule:

RewriteRule
^(([a-zA-Z0-9]+/)*[0-9]+(/[0-9]+)*/?(index\..*)?$)
blosxom.cgi/$1
[L]

That first part matches up archive entries by year, month and date in every category, possibly followed by an index page. (True, someone could post a URL which repeats a string of slash-separated numbers and it would still be processed, but it would have done so under the old rules as well. Maybe I will change that to force a “YYYY/MM/DD” format to the archives at a later date.) The “blosxom.cgi/$1″ dictates than anyone submitting a request matching the first expression is served a dynamic request, while the “[L]” portion tells the rewrite engine not to process anymore rewrite requests.

The above rule means that anyone requesting category pages not archived by date will receive a statically generated page. (I now have a script which will statically generate any modified pages and then remove any pages archived by date in order to save space.) Anyone requesting archives by date will receive a dynamic page.

I’m certain the above rule can be further optimised, but it’s good enough for now. If you use it and optimise it, please let me know.

Update: Some Apache mod_rewrite hacking has resulted in the following new set of rules:

RewriteRule
^(([a-zA-Z]+(/[a-zA-Z]+)*/)?(index\.(html|rss))?$)
-
[L]

RewriteRule
^(([a-zA-Z]+/)*200[2-9](/[0-1]?[0-9])?(/[0-3]?[0-9])?(/(index\.[a-zA-Z0-9]*)?)?$)
blosxom.cgi/$1
[L]

RewriteRule
^blosxom.cgi/(.*)$
-
[L]

RewriteRule
^(([a-zA-Z]+(/[a-zA-Z]+)*/)?[a-zA-Z0-9\-_\+]+.\html$)
blosxom.cgi/$1
[L]

That first rule allows HTML and RSS index pages for category URLs to escape rewriting and display the static page. The second rule is the same as my original rule above in that it serves dynamic pages for posts by date, but it also limits the valid values for the year, month and day. You can still enter an invalid date, it’s just a little more difficult. The third rule exists because Apache sometimes failed to stop the rewrite process after the previous rule. Finally, the last rule serves up dynamic single-entry permalinks.

You might notice that I have placed limitations on valid category names, post names and flavour names. It’s doubtful that I will have a category which contains numeric characters, or a post or flavour which contains characters other than alphanumeric.

Once again, if you use any of these rules and change them, I’d like to hear about the changes you make.

Posted on January 27th, 2003 in meta, site - No Comments »