Category: observations

for the month just ended, the site welcomed 60990 visits and 72067 page views.

Almost 1 million for the prior 12 months: as the monthly trend is upward, a month or two will see us there.

Thanks for making it happen.

[Posted with ecto]

SourceForge.net: Project Info – mod_gzip:

“mod_gzip is an Internet Content Acceleration module for the popular Apache Web Server. It compresses the contents delivered to the client. “

The first thing to look at in the weightwatching game is on-the-fly file compression: easily done. My index.html page went from 103,791 bytes to a more svelte 24,931 — a more than 75% savings. Since all modern browsers (ie, able to converse in http/1.1) can work with content-encoding-enabled servers, this was simplicity itself.

Simply add the mod_gzip module, and swipe someone else’s configuration 😉 :

mod_gzip_on yes
mod_gzip_dechunk yes
mod_gzip_can_negotiate yes
mod_gzip_keep_workfiles no
mod_gzip_temp_dir /tmp

mod_gzip_min_http 1000

mod_gzip_minimum_file_size 300
mod_gzip_maximum_file_size 0
mod_gzip_maximum_inmem_size 100000

mod_gzip_command_version modgzip_info
mod_gzip_add_header_count yes

mod_gzip_item_include file \.htm$
mod_gzip_item_include file \.html$

I suppose I could add .css and .js files to the list of compressible files. I’ll have to check and see how many errors are generated by this (does anyone not use a modern-enough browser??).

[Posted with ecto]

Marc’s Voice:

“So I apparently broke some rules on Orkut and have been banned. that is – my account is in ‘jail’.”

I took a tour through the wonderland that is Orkut myself last night: I feel too old to be there. All the listings indicate your relationship status (married, single, committed, open) which is something I rarely care about in a casual or more sustained relationship.

But more to the point, I think Scoble sums it up:

As a business person, my blog is far far far more useful than filling out a form of made up BS. Why? Because you can’t fake a blog for a long time if you use it for business purposes. If you lack integrity. If you are a jerk. If you are dishonest. It’ll be found out here.

What’s the old Bill Cosby joke about cocaine? He asked what was so great about it, and someone told him “it intensifies your personality.” Upon which point he pondered, “but what if you’re an asshole?”

Seriously, I can’t see the point of any of these: I think your network is an extension of what you do and who you are. If you contribute code to or write user docs for a project, your network/community stems from that involvement. If you’re an online commentator with some clue or insight on a topic (Daring Fireball or Freedom to Tinker come to mind), your network is drawn from your readers.

I’m not sure you can build one to order.

[Posted with ecto]

Web Page Speed Report – WebSiteOptimization.com: “Analysis and Recommendations

A report on the index page of this weblog . . .

TOTAL_OBJECTS – Warning! The total number of objects on this page is 23 – consider reducing this to a more reasonable number. Combine, refine, and optimize your external objects. Replace graphic rollovers with CSS rollovers to speed display and minimize HTTP requests.
TOTAL_IMAGES – Warning! The total number of images on this page is 20, consider reducing this to a more reasonable number. Combine, refine, and optimize your graphics. Replace graphic rollovers with CSS rollovers to speed display and minimize HTTP requests.
TOTAL_CSS – Congratulations, the total number of external CSS files on this page is 1. Because external CSS files must be in the HEAD of your HTML document, they must load first before any BODY content displays. Although they are cached, CSS files slow down the initial display of your page.
TOTAL_SIZE – Warning! The total size of this page is 187665 bytes, which will load in 42.00 seconds on a 56Kbps modem. Consider reducing total page size to less than 30K to achieve sub eight second response times on 56K connections. Pages over 100K exceed most attention thresholds at 56Kbps, even with feedback. Consider contacting us about our optimization services.
TOTAL_SCRIPT – Congratulations, the total number of external script files on this page is 1. External scripts are less reliably cached than CSS files so consider combining scripts into one, or even embedding them into high-traffic pages.
HTML_SIZE – Warning! The total size of this HTML page is 115134 bytes, which is over 100K! Consider optimizing your HTML and eliminating unnecessary content and features.
IMAGES_SIZE – Warning! The total size of your images is 65522 bytes, which is over 30K. Consider optimizing your images for size, combining them, and replacing graphic rollovers with CSS.
SCRIPT_SIZE – Caution. The total size of your scripts is 2287 bytes, which is above 1160 bytes and less than 4K. Consider optimizing your scripts and eliminating features to reduce this to a more reasonable size.
CSS_SIZE – Caution. The total size of your external CSS is 5169 bytes, which is above 1160 bytes and less than 8K. For external files, try to keep them less than 1160 bytes to fit within one higher-speed TCP-IP packet (or an approximate multiple thereof). Consider optimizing your CSS and eliminating features to reduce this to a more reasonable size.”

Some valid points here. Need to give this some thought . . .

[Posted with ecto]

You are 40% geek

You are a geek liaison, which means you go both ways. You can hang out with normal people or you can hang out with geeks which means you often have geeks as friends and/or have a job where you have to mediate between geeks and normal people. This is an important role and one of which you should be proud. In fact, you can make a good deal of money as a translator.

A new career opportunity . . . . ? Actually, I’ve done this (still do) and it doesn’t feel like work. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to look for?

[Posted with ecto]

From Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools list:

Abstract:
Individual preparedness is an important element of our nation’s strategy for homeland security. This report adopts a scenario-driven approach that provides a rigorous way to identify actions— linked specifically to terrorist attacks —individuals can take to protect their health and safety. The result is an individual’s strategy across four types of terrorist attacks— chemical, radiological, nuclear, and biological— consisting of overarching goals and simple and directive response and preparatory actions. The actions are appropriate regardless of likelihood of an attack, scale of attack, or government alert level; designed to be sensitive to potential variations; and defined in terms of simple rules that should be easy for individuals to adopt.

Click for the Quick Guide.
Full Version PDF

You don’t have to be paranoid to print these out and review them. Do you?

These terribly slow posting times for new posts and comments have been bugging me long enough. The first tip I read was to remove all your plugins. Well, I don’t use many, so I decommissioned the WayPath related content plugin to see if that helped and it cut the time in half. Hmm, needs work.

I also found a plugin that optimizes the HTML and lightens the page load. The docs are at the site: I’m just using a very basic configuration. This line goes before the opening <html> tag and the magic happens when you rebuild your pages.

<MTOptimizeHTML lowercasetags="1" emptytags="b i span center" comments='1" entities="1">

I’ve also enabled related entry display on individual entry pages, thank to the information I gleaned from here.

So the pages should load faster and display more meaningful stuff (assuming you find any of this meaningful).

[Posted with ecto]

833786 – Steps that you can take to help identify and to help protect yourself from deceptive (spoofed) Web sites and malicious hyperlinks:

“The most effective step that you can take to help protect yourself from malicious hyperlinks is not to click them. Rather, type the URL of your intended destination in the address bar yourself. By manually typing the URL in the address bar, you can verify the information that Internet Explorer uses to access the destination Web site. To do so, type the URL in the Address bar, and then press ENTER. ”

Take a look at the URL for the above-quoted page:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;%5Bln%5D;833786
Do you really want to type that in by hand? Weren’t hypertext links specifically devised to abstract away this kind of arcane gibberish?

I saw on some website or other the truism that MSFT’s lasting gift to computing is the assumption that computers are unreliable. Now we have this great step backward . . . . .

If you need any more reasons to use Mozilla or any other browser, I can’t help you.

[Posted with ecto]

The Tooney Bin — My lips didn’t move while I typed this.

People often ask me if I “hate Bush” and the answer is “no,” because I don’t think he even knows what in the hell’s going on half the time. It would be like hating a dummy because the ventriloquist is a dick.

James Seng, developer of the spam blocking “captcha” plugin for movabletype, also has a Bayesian filter plugin that tags potential spam comments.

This seems to work a little aggressively: I would think a post where the word “spam” appears would have a low likelihood of being spam . . . .
I guess it’s still in training mode if the comments are being published, even if they are labelled as spam.

[Posted with ecto]