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For PHP Geeks

August 18, 2002 in imported | No comments

For PHP Geeks
PDF Generation with PHP

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Lines & Grauman’s & Unintended Consequences

April 6, 2002 in imported | No comments

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.

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Referers Madness

February 21, 2002 in imported | No comments

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.

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We neither have, nor need, any stinking badges.

February 15, 2002 in imported | No comments

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!

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Quickies

February 14, 2002 in imported | No comments

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.

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Search Engine Upgrade to ht://Dig

January 27, 2002 in imported | No comments

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

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