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Friday, December 28th, 2007
So it seems like people using Macintosh computers will not be able to play the streaming audio in my Songs posts, but will instead get a "This playlist format is not recognized" error. I'm trying to figure out why; in the meantime I will put links to download the mp3 files next to the streaming objects. Update: If you can't play the songs embedded in my site, could you try the two players I posted here and let me know if either of them works for you? Thanks.
posted morning of December 28th, 2007: 5 responses
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Wednesday, December 19th, 2007
I may have just added an RSS feed. Try subscribing to READIN.  Update: I think it might be working!
posted afternoon of December 19th, 2007: 2 responses
➳ More posts about Projects
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Tuesday, December 11th, 2007
So I have a letter in the in-box this morning from Network Solutions, letting me know that my domain name is expiring in a year. This seems like a good time to ask: what's the story with other domain name registries besides NS? I understand there are some, and that they are cheaper -- do they do the same thing? NS is charging $100 for a 5-year registration which seems a little steep -- seems like it was less than that last time I renewed. I'll pay it if switching is a big hassle; but I reckon it's probably not a hassle. If you have any experience with this please let me know.
posted afternoon of December 11th, 2007: 2 responses
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Sunday, December 9th, 2007
Martha comments a few posts down that the media players are starting up automatically when she loads the page. This is not what I was wanting to have happen -- does anybody know what I should change? I have <PARAM NAME="autoStart" VALUE="false"> inside the <OBJECT> definition for each of them. They do not autostart when I load the page. Is anybody else seeing this behavior?
posted afternoon of December 9th, 2007: 2 responses
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Friday, December 7th, 2007
So here's how I came up with the new color scheme for this site, of which I am kind of proud -- I think it looks really pleasant, and might even potentially cause someone to remember the site who would otherwise not. To start with, the blog had no colors specified, so it used the client's Windows (or whatever operating system) colors. Usually this means black text on white background. Now I have my Windows colors set to a little different, so the background is a very light shade of gray and the text is a dark violet color -- I find it easier to read that way. I was reluctant though to specify colors because I did on the old READIN web site and came to regret having done it. But, well, I think this combination is good enough to use. Light yellow color for the background, deep violet text in the main portion of the window. Here, links are purple and bold if unvisited, dark gray and normal-weight if visited. If the mouse is over them, they are the horrible iridescent color unknown to man which is represented by #009900. (This is true for all links in the document.) In the sidebars, a lighter color background* and charcoal text, with the links a brighter sort of aquamarine color if unvisited and teal if visited. The links on the right-hand side (which is practically nothing but links) are not bold but the color should be light enough to draw attention to them -- the text around them is sparse. The links on the left-hand sidebar are the only ones that do not change appearance when visited, because they are small and easy to miss. (Note: Firefox renders this site better than Explorer. I am not sure why and I don't think it matters much because I think most of the visits to this site are with Firefox or such like. But MSIE does funky things with the borders and the positions of table elements.)
*The two are actually slightly different light colors, the one on the right a little blue or green, the one on the left a little orange or brown. I'm not sure why or what is the use of this.
posted evening of December 7th, 2007: Respond
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Wednesday, December 5th, 2007
What do you think? More readable or less? Pretty or ugly? Let me know. (Elements of the new look: colors and borders, varying font sizes and styles, dingbats. Everything sort of gradually being moved over from element attributes to style sheets.) Feedback please.
posted evening of December 5th, 2007: 4 responses
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Sunday, December second, 2007
These are a lot closer to what I was looking for. Still not quite 100% but they will do for now.
posted evening of December second, 2007: Respond
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Friday, November 30th, 2007
Hmm, Sharpie marker isn't giving exactly the effect I was thinking about. It's a step in the right direction though. Also need to learn how to edit GIFs so they are properly transparent.
posted evening of November 30th, 2007: 2 responses
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Tuesday, November 20th, 2007
You get a lot of stuff in your web server log file that does not have to do with actual human reads of your site. I wrote a script that I think shows all the human page views in an Apache log file. It relies on that browsers get css stylesheets, while robots generally don't. (It will miss humans using Lynx; it could easily be tweaked to fix that enough. Also, I have seen Yahoo getting css files; you can fix that by putting "Slurp" in the list of files you're not interested in.)
grep "blog.css" $logfile | // get all reads
of blog.css
awk '{print $1;}' | // extract ip address
sort | uniq | // only show each ip once
grep -f - $logfile | // now pass that list
of ip's back to grep
grep " 200 " | // only show successful reads
egrep -v (any files you're not interested in)
I believe you could also use "favicon.ico" instead of your css file, but this is less reliable -- I don't know how often browsers request favicon for sites they have already visited. Or you could use the filename of a graphic included on one of your pages and hosted on your site, I think this would work reasonably well.
posted evening of November 20th, 2007: Respond
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Wednesday, November 14th, 2007
So I'm coming up on 900 posts on this blog, in the past 4½ years. (And some number of "posts" in the previous 3½, when the site was something proto-blog-like, but there is not any easy way of counting them.) Here is how the activity breaks down year by year:
+--------------+----------+
| year(posted) | count(*) |
+--------------+----------+
| 2003 | 184 |
| 2004 | 175 |
| 2005 | 160 |
| 2006 | 135 |
| 2007 | 232 |
+--------------+----------+(Remembering that 2003 was not a full year for the purposes of this discussion) -- it seems like this last year is about the most active since I started blogging -- this becomes particularly noticeable when you consider that I posted very little in the first few months of this year. -- Indeed October '07 has half again as much activity as the next-most-active month, which is August '07; four of the ten most-active months are in 2007. This has been the latest installment of obsessing over meaningless statistics; tune in next month for popular Google search referrals.
posted evening of November 14th, 2007: Respond
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