Archive for July, 2003

URL Encoding

Thursday, July 31st, 2003

Here’s a page I found that has some information on URL encoding (You know those “%20″s you see in URLs sometimes).

I could be wrong, but I think that Safari does not do this on the fly. I ran into a problem recently with a script I wrote that was relying on the browser to automatically encode the URL. IE did it just find - Safari choked. In any case, I’ll be using the link above to manually encode the URL so Safari is happy.

More Referer Scripts

Wednesday, July 30th, 2003

I like to know some things about the people who visit my site. Most of the people are lurkers and don’t leave comments so I’ve been developing some referer scripts. Some other statistics I’ve started to develop are Browser Agents, Operating Systems, Search Engines and Visitor Locations.

I thought some of these scripts might be useful to other people, so I’m trying to package them up into neat little functions that anybody with MySQL and PHP on their site can use them.

I’ve started writing a “tutorial” of sorts about how to gather information about the people visiting your web site. I just posted “Day 1.” Day 2 may not necessarily follow tomorrow, but it will be coming soon.

blogroll in columns

Monday, July 28th, 2003

With the new layout of my site, I wanted something other than the traditional mile long blogroll column in a sidebar. More specifically, I wanted to break my blogroll into columns. With a little code from blogrolling.com;, I was able to whip up a PHP script in no-time to do just that.
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MT Activity Log overload

Saturday, July 26th, 2003

So, Good News: People have been coming to your site and using your mt-search feature a lot! Bad News: They’ve been using it so much, and you’ve neglected it for so long that when you go to try and view your “Activity log” the page won’t even load.

If you want to reset your activity log, but can’t even get the page to load in order to do so, here is what you need to do…
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Buymusic.com - BUYER BEWARE!!!

Thursday, July 24th, 2003

Issue has been (somewhat) resolved (but I still don’t plan on buying from them again) (See bottom of post for resolution)

Breaking the format here a bit, because I wanted to give a quick little review of my experiences with buymusic.com.

I’ve seen an article on Wired.com about this (thanks ste) and it seems already people aren’t thrilled with the licensing format that is in place on these music files. I can almost accept the fact that you’ll have to jump through hoops if you want to be able to download your music. Look, the music industry is whining that they’re losing money thanks to mp3s - the public wants to be able to get their music their way (which right now is digitally) - I can agree to compromise.

What I can’t agree to is bad customer service. If they’re going to have these tight restrictions about the files - they’re also going to have to be flexible when things don’t go perfectly - as we all know can happen when you’re working with computers.

Here’s my personal experience with them…
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Manual Trackback

Tuesday, July 22nd, 2003

Inspired by Adam Kalsey’s SimpleTrack, I wrote my own PHP script called Manual Trackback. (To be honest, I was chicken to ask Mr. Kalsey for a copy of his script.) This script allows an author of a weblog that does not support trackback to manually trackback to my weblog. All this weblog author needs to supply is the title of his or her weblog, the title or date of his or her weblog entry, the entry’s URL, and an excerpt. That’s it.
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Get an email when Google visits

Wednesday, July 16th, 2003

When googlebot comes (if it does!) to pages that contains this code, you get an e-mail sent to the address you specify.
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Implementing a Moderation System in a Movable Type Weblog

Monday, July 14th, 2003

Recently I added a Slashdot like moderation system to my home made weblogging software. The motivation was to add a simple way of offering your opinion on an entry without requiring a comment when you don’t have one. This grabbed the attention of Etan over at http://www.toomuchsexy.org/; who desired an implementation for Movable Type. After some work last night and this morning I believe I have perfected the Movable Type implementation.
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Link fest

Saturday, July 12th, 2003

Some links to throw your way.

Former scriptygoddess, Lynda’s: php woe (php tutorials) [link found by donna]

Blue Vertigo - massive amounts of web design resource links. [link found by Jennifer]

Creating a Sideblog in MT

Tuesday, July 1st, 2003

Having seen some great “sideblogs” across the internet (Christine’s Crumbs, Movablog’s Asides, and many others) I’m inspired to add a Sideblog to my own MT-powered blog. Anders created a short “how-to” for those who are not using php and it has inspired me to create a php version here.
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