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Tags: PHP
Lines & Grauman’s & Unintended Consequences
They’re lining up at Grauman’s Chinese For Star Wars 5, Er… Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones. Which reminds me of my Super Simple Countdown in PHP and of course my ancient R2.
Fun fact: I was living in Alhambra California in 1977 with my parents. My Mom was pregnant with my sister. My Dad took me to see it when Star Wars first came out, at Grauman’s Chinese. That was definitely one of the experiences that drove me back to California from Virginia to be a part of the movies. I inadvertently got sucked into a passion for all things internet and web, and, here I am.
Tags: california, PHP, things internet, Virginia, Wars Episode II
Referers Madness
Last night and this morning I added a Referer tracker for the San Diego Bloggers page in PHP/MySQL. It’s cool to see how people are coming to that site. I’ll probably add something similar for my own blog as well. Any suggestions as to how to order the data?
Other stuff to say, but not now.
Tags: PHP
We neither have, nor need, any stinking badges.
The San Diego Bloggers page has grown to 35 links. Some I found myself via daypop and google. Some were emailed to me from folks on various lists I’m on – I asked, and they provided! And some folks just found it randomly, and asked to be added.
Today I created a San Diego blogger badge.
Next up – a random blog function—picking it will take you to one of the blogs listed, which one? Only the gods of random numbers will know! I was going to do it in JavaScript, but then I realized that would be too easy. I want to do it in PHP and MySQL!
Yeah, because I don’t already have enough irons in the fire. Ha!
Quickies
Joel strikes again! with great insights on what clients are looking at when they evaluate our software and web projects. As in lfe,we judge things based on surface aspects that are less important than their underpinnings.
This is a great, funny, geeky cron anecdote. It made me laugh. (Requires some unix knowledge)
I think I’m going to implement one of these weblogs.com implementations, probably one of the perl or php ones.
Tags: PHP, unix, web projects
Search Engine Upgrade to ht://Dig
Last night and this morning I installed htdig as the new search engine for this site internally. Back in August I mentioned that I would start using google because the solution I was trying had stopped working with any reliability. ht://Dig is open source and originated here in San Diego at SDSU.
Total time for installation and customization was about 5 hours total. This is valuable information in case I ever need to install an htdig search engine for a client. Lots of small details in doing this installation. I downloaded the installation as a tar.gz file, then decompressed that to a suitable location (cgi-bin). Then I had to do configure, make, make install. Installing unix software is always an adventure. This site runs FreeBSD (see: colophon, and I was delighted that it went pretty smoothly.
Then I was ready to start running it. This got tricky, but it was straightforward as I was able to tweak the conf/htdig.conf file to do what I like. rundig is the key to indexing a site. At first I had broken images, but it was working properly. The site initially indexes the htdig site itself. Just like any web robot, it goes out and looks at that site just as a browser would. This put my mind at ease, as I was not sure how it would deal with databased content, or the fact that the pages on my site are very include() driven. I was also concerned that because it is a local search engine, it would index files I don’t want indexed. The perl search engine I had originally installed had this problem. It would find older versions of files and garbage files that had become garbage for a reason.
As I got it working, and pointed it at artlung.com, I found a problem. The indexing process was taking far too long. Seems I had an infinite loop happening! In my accessibility slideshow from 1999 I had a problem. The [next] and [previous] links did not give any thought to whether they should actually show or not. The php for that I had written when I really knew very little php, and I ended up with the search engine indexing not just /words/accessibility/?i=0 to /words/accessibility/?i=10, but it was iteratively visiting the “next” and “previous” links like crazy. ?i=-1, ?i=-2, ?=-3, and on until I stopped it at ?i=-115. That would have been 115 versions of the “previous” page that was no different than the “first” poge. The PHP I had written in 1999 was smart enough to handle bad values for $i, but not smart enough to realize that there was no “previous” pages for those pages. The “next” links had the same problem. The htdig indexer was not smart enough to know that it was indexing hundreds of nearly identical pages. The solution was to fix the slideshow code so that it would not produce spurious links like that. After that fix, it was indexed properly and quickly. This is probably another reason that many search engines simply won’t touch pages with querystrings.
The next problem I had was that it was showing bad search results for certain pages. Example: I searched for the word “Zappa” – and I got far more results than I would have expected. Granted, I am a Frank Zappa Fan, but why would the bio page come up in a result for that? Turns out the indexer found the entry inside the bottom
Tags: bad search results, htdig search engine, htdig site, html, include-driven site, local search engine, Perl, perl search engine, PHP, san-diego, search page, search engine, search engines, search results, unix, unix software, unix system, web robot
Some MacOSX Links of Note for Web Geeks
Killer page of OSX Links
It appears to be down at the moment. Google it and grab a mirror today!
Apache-mySQL-PHP installation tutorial
Apple’s OSX Downloads
Building OpenSSH 2.5.2 on Mac OS X 10.0.1
Building Zope and Python on MacOS X Server
Mac OS X / Mac OS X Server Resources
MacNN’s OSX News
MacOSX Apps
MacOSX Hints
MacOSX Tips & Tricks
Set Up Hosts in NetInfo
Setting up your OSX from scratch
Tips & Tricks for OS X Unix
VersionTracker.com’s MacOSX Software Updates
XIcons from MacNN – Icons like crazy!
Note to self: ImageGIF (and all related GIF functions) are not supported by pair Network’s php installation. It used to, but not anymore. It’s UNISYS’ fault. I’d burn all GIFs but it’s such a handy format.
heavy heavy sigh
Tags: GIF, Network's php installation, PHP
New Lab item. How to make .php files masquerade as .php3. It’s a bit of magic which requires the very cool mod_rewrite for apache. Good mod_rewrite tutorials here and here.
Initially this site had a search powered by a script from Matt’s Script Archive. Based on the timestamps on files I think I installed it in March of 1999. Last month I replaced it with another service. Problem is, a few weeks later, based on testing it now and again – it didn’t work more than it did work.
So what’s the answer?
Google! of course. Google comes around and indexes roughly monthly. What that means is that the blog will not always be instantly searchable. And day-to-day changes will only be searchable with a lag. But Google is good, and predictable.
If I can find a PHP solution that’s painless I may change again.
I learned a great deal on that first perlbased search though. Installing, configuring, testing.

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