Jeroen Sangers

After a quiet weekend in the swimming pool, the time has come to work a little bit. This week we will receive four visitor from abroad: my parents from August 12 ’till 19 and Roberto and Francesca on Wednesday and Thursday.

So that means preparing the beds, thinking about what we are going to eat, shopping, inviting my in-laws to have a supper at our house, … Fortunately, Maria José is working on a summer schedule, so she has a little bit more time than I have for these kind of things.

The thing that we don’t know yet is what to do this weekend (we have three free days) since it is too hot to stay in the city. The options are beach or mountains, my parents can decide.

It has been three days ago since I switched my site to the new server. Little by little the visitors switched as DNS servers synchronised all over the world. And little by little I noticed some problems on my site.

These problems were related the two changes I made in the set-up of my site: I moved my photo gallery from its subdirectory /photos to its own sub-domain photos.braintags.com and I changed all URLs of the individual archives from entry_name.html to entry_name/index.shtml.

The first change broke all links to the photos (and what is a photo gallery without photos?) which I corrected by editing all 51 entries. Furthermore I still have to create a symbolic link to some files from my main site, like robots.txt.

The second change broke nothing on my site, but some links to my pages on other sites (Google!) broke terribly. Therefore I decided to us my good friend mod_rewrite to serve people the right page. All I had to do was to create a rule to redirect requests for /archives/yyyy/mm/entry_name.html to /archives/yyyy/mm/entry_name/. So I created the following rule:

# Redirect old URI’s to future-proof directories RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteRule (archives/[0-9]{4}/[0-9]{2}/.*).html$ $1/ [R=permanent]

This did a good job, except for two problems: it also redirected the URI of my monthly archives to archives/yyyy/mm/index/ and it added a slash in front of the URI, so the URL would look like http://jeroensangers.com//archives/… The first problem was easily solved:

# Redirect old URI’s to future-proof directories RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !index.s?html$ RewriteRule (archives/[0-9]{4}/[0-9]{2}/.*).html$ $1/ [R=permanent]

For the second problem I am still looking for a solution.

Welcome!

If you’re reading this message, the server transfer was successfully finished. Exporting and importing all entries went without problems. Within 15 minutes I had copied all my texts to the new server. For sure there are some broken links (the coming period I am going to make them future-proof), but I will fix that the coming days.

Now all I have to do is wait until the DNS settings have been copied to all DNS servers over the world, and ask my old provider to drop jeroensangers.com.

Change of plans…

Yesterday I told that I was going to redesign my templates and style before switching to the new hosting provider. After one day of design work, I realise that I want so many changes that the rewrite is going to take weeks.

The style I was using until now was based on the default templates of Movable Type, which I adapted by adding and deleting some things, until it looked almost like what I wanted. What I am doing now, is starting with an empty file and adding one by one the elements I want to see. This is a slowly process, since I cannot spend the whole day working on this—I wish I could!

So now I decided that I am going to copy everything as it is now to the new location, and continue the rewrite on the background. Therefore I disabled comments on the most popular entries (to disable comments on all entries I need to edit them one-by-one. There is a script that can do this, but is requires PHP and MySQL, two of the reasons I am switching to another provider).

Now I have to copy the templates and do an export and import of the data. If everything works well, you will read the next message from the new server.

After I purchased an account for this site last weekend, I have been exploring the possibilities and planning how to switch my site to the new server. I prefer to think a little bit before I start copying recklessly.

The thing that took most of my time is making choices, since I have now so many more options than I had before. For example, I have three options to access my e-mail with a web client (NeoMail, horde or SquirrelMail), and three options to analyse the access statistics (AWStats, webalizer, Urchin).

Besides making choices, I have been experimenting on setting up a mailing list for the notifications, created a subdomain for my photo gallery, blocked some IP addresses, activated SpamAssasin on my e-mail, …

All these options are comfortably available through cPanel, something I have never seen before, but which I liked immediately.

Of course I started installing Movable Type, this time using a MySQL database to store all the information.

This gave me also the opportunity to play a little bit with MySQL. After setting up MT, I configured my three weblogs (Braintags, Braintags Gallery and Braintags Static Content), but did not yet copy the style sheets. I want to use this site conversion to update all my templates and styles. I am thinking about using a three-column layout for my main page, since the current sidebar is too long.

Besides that, I want to integrate my photo gallery by using a likewise style. So the next week I will be playing HTML-Kit and TopStyle Pro.

Once this is done, I will export and import all the date and change the DNS record so you all can see the new site (without pop-up banners!!).

FOAF provides an execellent vocabulary for describing people and the relation between people. It is a way to describe yourself—your name, email address, and the people you’re friends with—using XML and RDF.

This allows software to process these descriptions, perhaps as part of an automated search engine, to discover information about your and the communities of which you’re a member.

Of course I created a FOAF description of myself, using the FOAF-a-Matic. You can find my FOAF at http://braintags.com/foaf.rdf. If you link your FOAF to mine, please let me know, so I can update my file.

[Update 03.08.2003]: After seeing 23 404-errors in my logfile, I came to the conclusion that I must have saved the FOAF file with the wrong name. It is now fixed, so it should work alright.

For those people who are too lazy to look into the file, my FOAF description looks as follows:

<rdf:rdf xmlns:rdf=“http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" xmlns:rdfs=“http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#" xmlns:foaf=“http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/"> <foaf:person> <foaf:name>Jeroen Sangers</foaf:name> <foaf:title>Mr</foaf:title> <foaf:firstname>Jeroen</foaf:firstname> <foaf:surname>Sangers</foaf:surname> <foaf:nick>Beltza</foaf:nick> <foaf:mbox_sha1sum>6fe5a1c9a2f3ce9d6a53d4f82d0e4a92254bba2b</foaf:mbox_sha1sum> <foaf:homepage rdf:resource=“http://www.jeroensangers.com/"/> <foaf:phone rdf:resource=“tel:+34-6-19204630”/> <foaf:workplacehomepage rdf:resource=“http://www.icg.es/"/> <foaf:schoolhomepage rdf:resource=“http://www.uu.nl/"/> </foaf:person>

I don’t notice the pop-up advertisements on this site anymore, since the browsers I am normally using (Mozilla & Firebird) block them, but I know that they irritate quite some visitors of this site.

But as they say: you get what you pay for. I pay nothing for hosting this site, and in return I’ll have to accept that my provider adds these horrible things to my pages. 🙁

But I have good news for you: today I arranged a new hosting provider, and since I am paying a little bit, they will host my site banner free!!!!!!. I could have upgraded my current account, but I have found a provider who gives me a lot more for less!!!

Here are the specs:

• 75mb disk space
• 5gb/month bandwidth
• Unlimited e-mail accounts
• Unlimited FTP accounts
• Unlimited MySQL 4 databases
• Unlimited subdomains
• 4 mailing lists
• One domain
• PHP 4.3.1
• CGI-Bin (Perl)
• POP3, SMTP, IMAP, & Webmail
• Unlimited e-mail forwarders
• Unlimited autoresponders
• crontab
• …

For me, the biggest advancements are the MySQL database, unlimited POP3 boxes and PHP. I don’t know anything about PHP, but I have seen a lot of handy code that I would like to copy & paste in my templates.

Another benefit is that without the banner code, my pages will contain valid XHTML 1.1 code.

For the coming period, I’m afraid that I will still serve my site from the old location with pop-ups, since I want to set up the new server really, really good, and like to fix some design flaws in the current site.

Be patient, dear visitors…

Már Örlygsson has written a howto on creating ‘future-proof’ URLs in Movable type.

In short, he suggests storing individual archives at http://www.example.com/archive/2003/06/17/12.35.57/. The archive file will be called index.html.

I like this idea, since it will allow me to change my site, without having to change my URLs. If for example one day I decide to use PHP in my pages, all I have to do is change the template and create index.php files. Since the URL’s won’t change, no links break.

Some day I might try to implement this, but I won’t use the directory structure Már proposes (/yyyy/mm/dd/hh.mm/). He doesn’t use the title in the URL, since he writes in Icelandic, which has some ‘strange’ characters. I write in English, so I don’t have that problem.

The other problem Már describes is that the location of the file changes if you change the title. This is true, but I also think that you think first before you post, and choose the best title possible. I have never changed a title of a post afterwards, and am not planning to do so in the future. I do see that this might be a small risk.

I also won’t use a directory-level for the day. Not only because I don’t post that much, but even if in the future I start posting three entries each day, the 90 files per directory won’t be a big problem. The benefit of keeping the URL short and clear is more important for me.

When I want to reread a message, I often just type in the URL. I can’t always remember the exact day, but usually I know the month and the title of the post. With these two bits of information, I can quickly look up a page. So I’ll opt for URI’s like /archives/yyyy/mm/title_of_the_post/.

Today I finished entering my photo’s (51 in total) to my photo log. You won’t find any new photo’s there; all these photo’s have been available on my site for a long time already.

The benefits of this whole operation are that my photo’s can now have more than one category, the navigation is more intuitive and that you now have the ability to leave comments on photo’s (I implemented the photo log in MT). Besides that, it will be easier to maintain the whole thing, since I control my whole site with a single tool.

Now that this is ready, I have only two things left to do: remove the old Image Gallery and forward request for its pages to the new location, and restyle the photo log according to the style of the rest of the site. The first thing I will do today, the second one may take several months.

[Update 31.07.2003]: I just removed Image Gallery and changed my .htaccess file to redirect all requests to my photo log.

After seeing a poll on SlashDot for the number of operating systems you have worked with for at least an hour, I started thinking about my answer to that question.

My first guess would be something like 6-8. After thinking a little bit more, I came to the following list:

• AIX
• Apollo Domain
• BeOS
• Commodore 64 OS
• DR-DOS
• FreeBSD
• HP-UX
• Irix
• iOS
• Linux (HAL91, Mandrake, muLinux, RedHat, Slackware, SUSe)
• Mac System 5/6/7
• MS-DOS
• Netware
• OS/2
• PalmOS
• SCO Unix
• Solaris
• Thu64
• VMS
• Windows 3.x
• Windows 9x/Me
• Windows NT/2000/XP
• Windows CE/PocketPC

That makes 23, amazing!!!

Of course you can always discuss about the definition of an OS. I decided to group some closely relates OS’s like Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows Me, and the different Linux distributions, but other people might consider each of them as a seperate OS. I have been thinking to group all flavours of Unix (including Linux) in one group, but than I would also have to group all flavours of Windows. Fact is that the different Unices can be very different from each other, so I left them alone.

What is your list? Have you worked with any OS that is not on my list? Just leave your list in a comment.