Plaidophile

Dreamhost had a problem with one of the file servers which they thought was just a minor transitory problem but then ended up being a major problem. Once they realized the severity of the problem they rather quickly fixed it. So now my sites, email, etc. are all back. Hooray!

Every now and then I'll do some random poking around of something which happens to be something I've mentioned on my weblog, and I'll come across some weblog-aggregation/community thing which syndicates my weblog for all the wrong reasons.

For example, while seeing if I could find any stats about my PSN profile, I came across an aggregator view of my announcement here.

The funny thing, of course, is where my weblog is categorized.

I decided for some reason (which seemed like a good reason at the time though I can't remember it now) to change my main site's permalinks from category/sub_category/basename.php to category/subcategory/basename/. It's what all the cool kids are doing. Of course since I do some pretty wonky stuff behind the scenes some of the relative links and stylesheet references and so on may be messed up... I think I caught everything but if something looks wonky and it didn't look wonky before, let me know.

The other thing I found is that Dreamhost has some wonky PHP-injection-detection stuff which makes POSTs fail if it sees various unsafe function names inside a <?php> block. Although this is generally a good idea, it did make it rather difficult to add some logging code to the permalink redirect script (so I can track where old-style permalinks are being visited from, and fixed if possible).

Oh, and sorry for spamming peoples' RSS readers yet again.

I thought I was being cutting-edge and standards-helping by making all my new stuff XHTML instead of HTML4, but it turns out I was only contributing to the mess that is Internet. So I'm making all my stuff HTML4 instead.

Generally this means fixing my DOCTYPEs and removing all />s from my various pages, which is more or less automatic but something might have gotten messed up, so if you see something wrong, please let me know. Also I may have been overzealous and actually messed up a couple of truly XML things (like RSS feeds).

In theory, the best way to IM me is via Jabber at fluffy[at]beesbuzz[dot]biz, although in practice AIM is still a bit nicer (in that it doesn't bind a conversation to a single client so I don't lose out when someone's still messaging me and I'm using a different computer). It's actually been working since DNS finished propagating but I forgot to post an update.

If you're seeing this, then DNS has propagated over to you. Yay!

I decided to move my stuff over to Dreamhost. My little Mac mini was getting overworked by serving up so much stuff, and my home DSL connection was getting pretty slow as well. Also, Dreamhost offers a lot of rather nice stuff including a vhosted Jabber server, a pretty nifty file selling mechanism (which I am most definitely considering for any albums I put out in the future), and much better uptime especially considering how often OSX security updates are getting pushed out lately.

I'm converting my databases from Postgres to MySQL so I can move my sites over to Dreamhost. I think this has all gone off without a hitch, but I need to test it, of course.

I thought I'd try seeing what'd happen if I quietly allowed anonymous posting again, since for quite some time I've completely hidden the forum from search engines (including hiding all forum-related links to all web spiders). A few days ago I enabled anon posting for the weblog and for de^x/dx. In that time, I got:

• One legitimate comment (which would have been better-suited to email, and was posted to a 'topic for debate' thread which I leave open to anon comments anyway)
• Three spams

There must be SOME middle ground for comment posting which encourages real visitors to post without making it easy for spammers to do so. (And yes I have a lot of anti-spam measures on my forum, but these spams are being posted by humans.)

I'm trying Project Wonderful for (discreet, unintrusive) ads, mostly just to see what sorts of bids and ads I get. It certainly wouldn't be a source of real income or anything (I doubt it'd even make a dent in my hosting costs, even), due to the way the pricing structure works. I see it more as a fun link-placement service, where people can happen to pay money (a few cents a day) if they want to ensure their link appears.

It's interesting that so far, all of the sites (and most of the ads) I've seen on it are webcomics. I guess that comes with the territory of it being yet another Internet project run by Ryan North.

9:15 Wow, my first ad already, from someone I haven't even heard of before! Huh.

This is one of the things I was working on last night (and am mostly done with now, though I need to draw a person in running and jumping poses): new 403 error page.

I also have a 404 one in the works, and an oh-so-cute idea for a 500 page (for those rare but sunny times that I break something). I can't do the 500 one until I'm back at home though since I don't have my Logic XSKey with me (and so I can't record the song for it).

protocat always has his away message set to, "I may actually be away. Please leave a message. Haikus welcome." So I always write him bad haiku. Today I decided to collect the "best" ones.

(It was also yet another stylesheet experiment, which is more fun than the content itself.)

I got tired of de^x/dx being on the front page, so I moved it all inside of itself and replaced the main page to better aggregate the things I do.

There's still some hinky broken stuff (especially the meta-pages which I haven't gotten around to styling) but I think this works better in general.

So, I don't ever actually go out of my way to support IE6 on any of my sites, but on most of my sites (even with the more complex layout) it's at least readable. But my new Sockpuppet site is so beyond broken on IE6 I wouldn't even know where to begin making it work (and even getting it somewhat consistent between Safari and Firefox was rather difficult, which is surprising considering how visually-simple this layout is). Normally I wouldn't mind, but this level of brokenness makes it just plain unreadable.

I could make it just serve up a special IE6 stylesheet or something (that's easy enough to do) but I really can't be bothered to deal with it right now.

The server which hosts my email is currently down, so I'm currently without email. Which is actually kinda cool since it's one less distracting time-drain, but it also makes it harder for people to get in touch with me if they don't know any of the other myriad ways of getting in touch (AIM 'plaidfluff', private messaging on my forum, etc.).

Also it means not getting any of my forum subscription messages. Which makes it even more of a win!

My condo's DSL service new hosting facility is finally getting set up tomorrow, so at about 7 AM PST this site will be temporarily down, until I get my *ahem* server happily colocated. Email to me will still work, though.

10:21 Yay, my mini is sitting pretty. Er, I mean, my big ol' server rack is. Really.

Looks like someone was trying to DDoS my site for some reason. Lots of random accesses to weblog entries all generated by some user agent which used a referrer of "http://beesbuzz.biz" (which is not a reasonable referrer for any weblog entries), the same user-agent string, a long series of spaces after the "HTTP/1.1" in the request header (also not typical in legitimate user-agents), and came in at a rate of about 10 per second from 62 unique hosts.

I decided to finally switch over to the name-based permalinking that is so popular with all the kids today. I did it in a way which I think will be friendly and so on to everyone, and it'll also be possible to remigrate things again in case I decide I don't like this setup and don't mind even more cruft around, but yeah, this should help.

Oh and yeah I got tired of the white text on a dark patterned background, just as I got tired of the even darker one before it. Though in some ways this is a lot like my original style.

Too many people are using Firefox 1.5 and the Firefox people are slow in fixing the stupid background-attach:fixed bug, so I've done a stupid stopgap change to the layout to stop triggering the bug (which makes things slightly less-neat-looking but whatever). Someday I'll just redo the whole weblog layout anyway (yes, again).

What do they think they gain by spamming my forum?

Recently a whole bunch have shown up in ways that I can't easily trace, and the ones which I can trace are, oddly enough, finding the forum by searching on other spammers' user names. So that makes my mod_rewrite-based thing no longer as useful. (Not to mention it shows that a lot of them are either in cooperation or feeding off of each other. Very odd, either way.)

Two spammers in the last few days, and nothing I can see to prevent this particular case but plenty of room for it to get much worse. Meh. I've added some stuff back into my robots.txt which should help, at least.

Relative hyperlinks in my RSS feed should now be correct. Including that very link right there.

(Argh, except they're not. Just a sec.) Okay, fixed.