Jeroen Sangers

Yesterday suddenly it was there: the summer! But wait, I can’t remember that we passed spring. That’s right, it is more like the season changed from the wet season into the dry season. Is our climate really changing, or is did this just happen accidentally?

One of the additions to Movable Type is a news box in the main menu of the main menu. This box syndicates the latest news from the Movable Type site, and has a prominent position on the top right of the screen.

I prefer to read syndicated content through my news reader, and this news box simply irritates me. So I searched through the files and removed the responsible code. In case you want to do the same: you’ll need to edit the file tmpl/cms/list_blog.tmpl, and remove lines 7-13 (starting with <div class=“news-box”>).

I have upgraded to Movable Type 3.0, and am trying to fix the templates at the moment. During the next days, posting comments might give some problems, but I am working on it.

On the web a lot of people complain about the new licences, but I haven’t got any problems with it. As this site uses only three webblogs –the main site, the photo site and one for static content– and has only one author –that’s me :-D–, I fall exactly within the limits of the free licence. And if I really need more, I have no problem paying for it. Let’s face it, they made a far better CMS than I will ever be able to make myself.

The installation went without any problems, the pesky part is in the Individual Archive templates. There have been many changes, and I will have to go through my code line-by-line to see what I have to change.

To make it even more difficult, they did not escape ampersands in their code! The same thing happened in their 2.66 update, and I really expected that they’d learned something. Anyway, soon I expect version 3.01, which fixes these errors in the JavaScript.

Another problem I ran into is their use of JavaScript as: document.comments_form.email.value = getCookie(“mtcmtmail”);, which typically won’t work in documents served as application/xhtml+xml. I have to change all these lines to use the document.getElementById function.

You notice: work enough to do, so I’ll better get back into debugging mode.

[Update 2004.05.17]: They did escape ampersands, but that I was using the wrong version of their code.

There is a law that is valid on both the internet as on every school yard: how important you are depends on who your friends are. Nowadays on the internet, your importance is expressed as PageRank. PageRank is a number between 0 and 10, calculated in a very secret way, but based on the amount of links to your site and the PageRank of the sites linking to you. If you own a site with a high PageRank (8+) you can earn a lot of money by simply putting a link to other sites on your homepage.

Knowing this, I wondered how popular I am. What is the PageRank of this site, where on the internet popularity scale am I. I looked it up, and found that I am exactly in the middle; I have a PageRank of 5/10. I am not the most popular guy on the school yard, but neither a looser without any friends.

This made me wonder what I had to do to get a 6. What kind of sites have a 6? And a 7? So I visited some sites from my bookmarks and made a short list with example sites for each PageRank:

It was quite difficult to find sites with PageRank 1 and 2. Most sites I found have a PageRank of 3 and 4. Most popular sites reside at PageRank 8. Jong Nederland Harmelen obviously did something very wrong, since Google punishes them hard for not letting the GoogleBot spider their site.

Here is a short manual on finding products and services on the internet. I found this method when I was looking for SyncML servers. A quick google on several keyword combinations did not result in the product I was looking for, but using the method described below I found what I wanted:

1. Write down exactly what you are looking for, and why you are looking for it;
2. Publish your writings on the internet, and make sure your page uses Google AdSense;
3. Wait a day, and visit your page. Notice the advertisements placed by AdSense;
4. ???
5. Profit!

Why does AdSense give better results than a normal search? I guess the reason is that AdSense works in a reverse way. In a normal search I enter a few keywords, and the engine returns me a zillion of results. AdSense analyses the whole text, and returns only a few results. Of course I tried to paste the whole text in a normal Google search, but I found out that Google has a limit of only 10 keywords. Another reason for the better performance is that AdSense has a very limited database, containing almost exclusively commercial products and services.

Mozilla Firefox is a great internet browser, and I just love tabbed browsing. Each day I look in Bloglines to see which sites have been updated, and I open up all interesting reading matter in new tabs — I CRTL-click more than I click. After that I go one by one through my tabs, reading each page and opening interesting links in new tabs. I continue doing so until I have closed all my tabs, or until I run out of time, in which case I simply bookmark all open tabs. The good thing about loading pages on tabs it that I can load many pages before I read them; each time I close a tab, I find a new page waiting for me.

But there is one thing that annoys me. As you might know, I am very interested in web design, and many sites I read are about standards web design. Therefore, more and more sites I visit are standards compliant: clean HTML and designed with CSS. In my opinion Firefox does not handle these sites correctly, since it only starts loading background images the moment I focus on a tab. Thus many times I close a tab, I am confronted with an almost white page with some text on it, which then is converted little by little in a beautiful design. I do not understand why Firefox waits until I focus on the tab and does not pre-load the background images while I am reading other sites.

Or is there some hidden configuration option I don’t know about?

SyncML is an XML standard for synchronizing data between devices. The most common use for it is to create back-up copies of your cellphone data, or even synchronise it with your desktop PIM.

I want that too! The user manual of my phone describes how I can set up synchronisation to store a copy my data on the Siemens web site. But…. it did not work. After looking in every corner of the Siemens site, I came to the conclusion that they only support SyncML for some countries, and Spain is not one of them. Also on the site of my provider Movistar I could not find anything about SyncML.

In the mean time I read a little bit more about SyncML, and came to the conclusion that it is a very simple XML based protocol. Besides that, I figured that the average cellphone has a maximum 5Mb of data, so it must be very cheap to set up a SyncML server. My friend Google showed me some companies offering SyncML accounts, but they charge the same amount that I pay for hosting this whole site!!!

Mmm, maybe I can find some software that I can install on my own server. Once again I asked my friend Google, and he offered me two solutions: Sync4j is a Java based solution, which requires setting up a Java server (JBoss or Tomcat). I run Apache, and I prefer to use a solution that also uses Apache.

The second option is a PHP solution with a mySQL back-end. That sounds a lot better! I quickly set up the database and installed the script. But my phone could not synchronize. :-( I assume that my phone uses the binary WBXML format, which is not yet supported by the script…

What next?

[Update 2004.05.12]: I found a free service where I can store my calendar en addresses: Mobical. It is a pitty that they do not support notes and tasks yet, but at least I can backup my address book. Now all I have to do is find a SyncML plug-in for Palm Desktop, and I will be the happiest mobile user in the world!

Since September of last year, this site is also available in WAP format at http://wap.braintags.com/. As you might imagine, there are not many people using this feature, I guess only 2-5 visitors per day.

With my new phone I also had a look at this site over WAP, and ran into an error. Clearly the template I was using was not OK. I made this template myself, because at the time I could not find a suitable template on the internet.

I decided to search again, and found Building a Better Wap Diary describing how to set up a WAP site with individual archives. This sounded interesting, since until now I published the last X items in a single file, without the possibility to view archived posts. I quickly set to work, using the provided templates as the base for my own styled pages. I checked the result on two different phones and on a WAP emulator on the internet, and it looked alright on all of them. The new WAP site is better in three ways:

• The index page contains only the titles of the last entries. Before it contained also the full texts. Therefore, the index will load much faster;
• Now all texts are available, in stead of only the latest ones. I only have to wait for Google to pass by, and I expect an increase in the number of visitors;
• I also included the comments and trackbacks in the individual archives.

Todays trend in weblog country is the Ego Watch: looking at which position you end up on several search engines. It started with Brad Choate, directly followed by Baviaan. And here are my results:

It looks like I’ll have to use my surname Sangers more on this blog, and somehow I’ll have to convince Google that I am an important Jeroen. Excite obviously does not like me.

[Update 2004.05.07]: Added MSN [Update 2004.05.11]: Added A9

Do you recognise this:

You are at your office, browsing the internet to solve a specific problem. You open some pages looking for the right clue, and suddenly you see an interesting story, explaining how you can manipulate HotMail to send passwords of other users to you. It is not related to your current search, but you would like to read it over quietly at home — you already imagine using this trick to fool some friends who stubbornly keep on using HotMail…

What I always did in these situations was send the URL by e-mail to my personal e-mail address. Other people post them on their site, and use Google to retrieve them, but I am not that advanced yet.

Anyways, I haven’t been satisfied with this solution for a while, so I was full of joy when I found the Bookmarks Synchronizer for FireFox. I configured this little add-on to grab a file from my FTP server when starting FireFox, and to write the changes to this file when closing FireFox. Now I only have to maintain one single bookmarks file, which I can use at all my computers!