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I wake up this morning with 28 new comments on my site that all say the same thing. Apparantly the spammers have found a way to enter the captcha images via a script. The standard JomComment captcha images are not that hard to read so maybe the spammers are just getting smarter. I really don't want to have to force everyone to be logged in to comment so that's my last resort.
Now I've turned off the JomComment Captcha and turned on re-captcha which distorts the words even more and has double the number of words. It also puts lines through the text etc.. The other plus is that re-captcha uses our brain power to solve words that OCR was unable to solve. Meaning there are a lot of pre-computer books that are being scanned in and there are words that the OCR can't interpret. Re-captcha pulls those words out and gives them to us as a security text. Humans then read the words, solve them (to comment in this case) and the result is sent back to re-captcha where it's used to finish the translation of an old book to digital form. Kill two birds with one stone.
Everyone wins, you get to comment, I get less spam and old books get digitilized...
I also have my site contacting wordpress and using their akismet service to detect known spammers. I think Wordpress would have a pretty big list because they're known for being a target. Also non-registered user comments are now approved by me first. If you want your comment auto-published then log in!
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I've not had time for quite a while to do anything but add articles to this site. I still don't have time but I'm getting tired of looking at half hacked up modules and components. There have been several Joomla components and modules that I've not been satisfied with but I've not had time to find replacements. As of today the commercial MyBlog component is gone. This is something I paid for but ultimately didn't like the way it handled things nor did I like the fact that I couldn't add features to it. That's right, I wanted to work for free to make it a better product but since it's commercial I can't. My second choice was IdoBlog which is under the Creative Commons license. It says I can modify the code but all changes have to go back to the project and I can't give them to anyone else. This too isn't good enough. I'm now just running under the standard Joomla Sections and Categories with JomComment for comments and social bookmarking. I'll be looking into tagging and expanding RSS feeds in the future.
Also the sitemap is gone but will be back. The component I used for that was really nice but it too took over how things looked. If you clicked on an article instead of getting the standard Joomla article you got something formatted by the sitemap app. I didn't like MyBlog doing this and I don't like my sitemap doing this. Consistancy is the key here. If Joomla has a failing it's that you can get lost in a Joomla site just because the same article can look 3 different ways depending on how you got to it. I don't like this.
I've been going through the menus as well to make things simpler and more user friendly. The side bar will only be used for apps that deal with the content in the main pane. Before I had duplicate menus there for usability purposes. If for some reason someone couldn't use the top menus they could click on the section name and then have a second menu on the left. I don't like this. I'll be considering options.
I have some new exciting things that I may be springing on grantmcwilliams.com that I've been wanting for a while - namely reviews. I paid a chunk of money for commercial review module and even though it worked great I couldn't use it with Joomla 1.5. The author updated it and wanted to charge me again so I deleted it. So far I've paid about $200 for commercial components and outside of JomComment they've all been a waste of money.
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For currently unknown reasons my server is rebooting about once a day so I'm troubleshooting it now but so far nothing seems to be wrong which means it's probably hardware, maybe memory or motherboard issue. I'm hoping for motherboard because I have two more dual Xeon motherboards sitting on a shelf waiting for action... So until then there may be intermittent outages. Thank you for your patience.
Grant
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All of my domains were down last night due to my personal file server finally dieing after 5 years of reliable service. It's an old dual Athlon MP system with 3ware 9550SX Raid controller and 5 drives. This doesn't have to do with my web domains outside of the fact that I finally moved the Raid controller over to the Super Dual Dual Core Xeon server that hosts my Xen Web and Mail servers. Now the file server is also hosted in a Xen domain on the same server. Because I had to shut the machine down to install the Raid controller my sites (soundlinuxtraining.com, grantmcwiliams.com) were down.
I appologize for the inconvenience.
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You might be wondering why I only have some of my trip journals up. Well, if you know that I've been to more places than are here you also probably know a bit about me and that I'm a little lazy when it comes to writing these things. The following journals are missing or incomplete.
- London to Istanbul 2004 - didn't write one and now probably won't although it would be pretty interesting considering how clueless I was. Highlights would include - French pastries rock!, guidebooks exist, it's true because I found out near the end of my trip, the French people are awesome!, people in the Riviera speak English, missing your chunnel train can be expensive even with a Eurail pass, Rick Steves backpacks suck, Europeans don't have clothes driers so you need to plan ahead, cruise ships are not for me (really really not for me), geek cruises are NOT training!, Italians are rude,always bring your memory cards with you when visiting ancient greek ruins, some toilets don't let you sit down, "I don't speak German" is more useful than you think when you're trying to get out of a train in Germany and you have a line of Germans behind you, Neuschwanstein is fake - Dachau is not - you figure out which impacted me more, sleeping all night in a doorway in London is not that comfortable nor is sleeping on a bus "bench" or in a train terminal or airport or on a bus, you should alternate which sides of airplanes you ride on in case you'd like to use your neck within 2 weeks of arriving home and lastly sleeping whenever you're tired when crossing 9 times zones is not a great plan to beat jetlag.
- Caribbean 2005 - First trip with kids to Orlando, Key west and Cozumel. Major things life happened to us here but too long ago to worry about.
- Europe/France 2005 - That would be a great trip journal, maybe some day I'll write it when I get time. We learned a lot this year, like how missing cheap Ryanair flights get really expensive, the 35 different ways to get to mainland Europe from England, how some "palaces aren't", what bed bugs feel like (somewhat related to the previous item), how wonderful American cheeseburgers taste after being in England for more than 24 hrs, what a constant supply of eggs will do to my digestive system, how to sleep in Italian train stations, how to sleep on hard ferry berth floors, how to sleep on Italian trains, how to sleep past your stop and then find another train back and lastly how to get stranded literally in the middle of the adriatic. So yes, there's probably a trip journal there somewhere.
- Washington DC 2006 - Smithsonian is a joke, Ethiopian food is the bomb as are Chilean empanadas, you can't buy a sweater at the mall but you can get plenty of FBI tshirts, Washington monument is not a tribute to Bill Clinton. Relatively short trip but enjoyable anyway. I started the trip journal but didn't finish it.
- British Colombia 2007 - Um, interesting but usually I write trip journals during the trip and about the time I got started the trip was over. Maybe I'll copy out of Natalya's since she has a brutal overlord forcing her to write while on the trip.
- Western Europe 2007 - it's just not that interesting to have a trip journal 45 days long and half of it we stayed in the same spot, more of a synopsis is in order I think. We did spend a week in Slovenjia, went to Ireland (finally), Amsterdam (I think I was there), Brussels the cul(cough)- culinary cap(cough) - culinary capital of Eur(cough cough)ope, and Vienna where we ate nothing but sausages and apple strudel because it's all we can say in German, that was nice and should be written about.
- Yucatan Peninsula 2007 - bad food, listen to Piper yammer, great ruins, listen to Piper yammer, bad food, - repeat as necessary. Highlights would be snorkeling, swimming with dolphins, meeting new friends from Barcelona and Argentina, trying to convince them that Mexican food really does taste good and Taco Bell (ew!) makes better Mexican than can be had anywhere on the Yucatan Peninsula, hurricanes are best avoided during vacations and lastly Latinos airlines would kick our domestic airlines tail fins if allowed to compete in this country.
Thats about it. I guess there probably would be some entertaining trip journals in there somewhere.. If I only had the time.
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Grantmcwilliams.com com was down for the last day because of a Gb-E network switch that decided to stop passing any traffic without any warning at all. It was probably find because someone hacked my Joomla template and inserted a greeting card submit form at the top of every page. An update to the latest Joomla 1.5.7 resolved that and taking the switch out of commision solved the other part.
Anyway, things are back to normal now.
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It seems the recent heat wave has wreaked havoc on my web server so I've been experiencing outages on grantmcwilliams.com. A new server has been built with a billion fans (sounds like the boeing plant) and I'm moving all virtual hosts to it now. I figure I'l have it up in the next couple of days. A virtualized Zimbra server is already up and running and now I'm building the webserver.
Thanks for your patience,
Grant
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In the past couple of months I've been trying out many Joomla! components, modules and plugins in order to make my site better. Problem is some of the components don't work together and I end up with broken links, debug code or error messages. People have complained and I have listened. Since I have my own server I've put up a virtual host and installed Joomla! on it as a sandbox. From now on I'll test all code on the sandbox until I think it's right and then roll it out on grantmcwilliams.com. It would be a lot easier if the components just did everything I wanted them to do (wouldn't that be nice!) but they don't. What's worse is the modules that I have to hack away on to make do what I want. There's no place on a production website for beta code so that too will be done in the sandbox.
I'll be moving the entire site off a dual Athlon MP 2600 server to a new dual dual core Xeon (that would be four 3 Ghz 64bit cores) rack server in the near future. PHP/MySQL/Apache and the OS will also be upgraded from CentOS 4.4 to CentOS 5.2 so everything will running in a confined SELinux domain. The RAID drives will be replaced by 1TB Samsung F1 drives on a 3ware 9550 PCI-X controller and RAM will be tripled so I'll be caching everything. I just need to complete the wiring and make sure it has adequate cooling before I move it. I have everything now but the TB drives which may wait until I'm back from holiday. I may move to FiOS as well which would get me a 15Mb/sec synchronous connection. Expect major speed increases from grantmcwilliams.com in the near future.
Also when I get back I'll be putting in a major effort coding the appropriate pieces of software for Joomla! that I need. Blogging/tagging needs to be better, the photo gallery needs a lot and the cookbook needs rewrote. Much to do...
Grant
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Some of you that have bookmarked a page or an RSS feed may have noticed that some things are being moved around so let me explain what's going on for now.
Search Engine Friendly
I've been wanting more Search Engine Friendly URLs. Here's an example. The first url is the replacement for the second - much nicer eh?
- http://www.grantmcwilliams.com/tech/programming/php
- http://grantmcwilliamso.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=category§ionid=9&id=68&Itemid=330
Not only that but I've been wanting much nicer blogging so I can have articles appear to be in more than one category without more work for me. For instance if I have an article that talks about Qemu and Xen I want it in both categories so people watching my RSS feed on Qemu will get articles that may have been under the Xen category before. Ideally someone could subscribe to a Virtualization RSS feed and get all posts in all Virtualization categories, ie. Xen, KVM, Vbox and Qemu. The problem is that Joomla! has a very limiting category system that only has two levels (Section and category) and an article can only belong to one category in one section. Dedicated blogging software like Wordpress handles this fine but doesn't integrate very well with Joomla! although I used it for about a year in the past. There is very little in the way of Joomla! blogging components but one looked very promising - MyBlog. It's a commercial component for about $45 that makes very nice looking blog posts, has RSS feeds and has tags so I can have an article be in many categories. However, it's mission statement reads something like this - "want to have all the positives and negatives of Wordpress in a Joomla! component". If I have a list of howtos then I have to keep them in the Joomla! category system in order to do a category list and tags don't work or I let MyBlog handle them but I can't have a category list at all and the format is very different.
If there's one complaint I have with Joomla! sites it's lack of consistancy. You'll see an article with all kinds of random urls and blocks of icons at the bottom which seem to change depending on where you are on the site. I want to avoid this if possible.
What Joomla Blogging should be like
I want this site to be so simple to navigate and use that anyone can use it. That means that the header of an article should have the
- Title
- poster (usually me),
- date
- tags
- gravitar (although not that important)
It should also give the option to
- make pdf
- Subscribe to RSS feed
The last thing is the footer of the article should have
- Read More button
- Comment link
- Social Bookmarking link.
I may be going down a track that I hadn't intended but all of the code for what I want is available now but it's not integrated so I'm thinking that if I took what was there, put it together into a unified project and made it work than we'd have a really good free blogging component.Following is my current list of what I'm playing with.
- Bookmarks
- JooTag
- Akocomment (or similar)
- gravitar
- JT Auto ping
If all of this code was wrapped up in one package I'd have just about everything I want in one component. I've been looking at the code for JooTag and I think it should be the starting point. It already has tagging buttons for the editor and will list tags under the article header. I need to add a nicer CSS to it, fix some linking bugs, make sure it works with the standard RSS feed links, and get it to either work with my JomComment or integrate a comment component into it. I don't think the gravitar support will be that hard and the Bookmarks module will be easy to merge into the JooTag footer.
Anyway so there's a lot of work going on here and I don't have a lot of time. If I don't get it done I may just deal with standard Joomla! categories because it's easy to roll things over to a tagging system later.