Jeroen Sangers

I mentioned them yesterday: the not yet so famous band Apesjit.

Why Apesjit? Sure, they are not the greatest band I know, but they are nice guys, certainly funny and play quite well. In short, they deserve some promotion and I gladly reserve a small spot on my site for them.

The first time I met Apesjit was in 1999 when we went to the Nirwana tuinfeest, a small festival in Lierop. We didn’t know what to expect, but after seeing Apesjit on Saturday early in the afternoon, we knew that we would have a great weekend. What a show!!!

Of course we immediately bought some t-shirts and after that directly to the band to complain about the text on the shirt. This was the case: they tried to convince us that you have to pronounce the band name as in English: Ape-shit. However, the spelling of their name is definitely Dutch (and their lyrics are Dutch as well), so we continued pronouncing the name in Dutch. Part of the t-shirt contained a dictionary page, explaining what Apesjit is, and according to the band we could see there how to pronounce it: Eip–∫jit. We told the band to make up their minds and choose between their Apeshit or Eipfjit. Until that moment we will continue using the Dutch pronunciation.

After that first concert we have travelled several times to the far south of the Netherlands to see them (on stage or looking side by side to other bands), and we even arranged a concert for them in Harmelen.

Now that I live in Lleida, I cannot visit them anymore. I surely would have liked to see their performance at the zwarte cross, where they played from a truck driving over the cross track. And surely they will be present at the coming Tuinfeest festival; not to play, but to enjoy the music and drink some beer.

If I want to see them again, I will just have to wait until they are famous enough to do an European tour. Until that moment; all I can do is give them some publicity…

I missed an important (for me at least) event: two days ago, the Mozilla Thunderbird project released their first milestone (version 0.1).

I have been using a nightly built for some weeks now, and I am really happy with it. However I have ran into some minor issues, which I hope will be solved with this release. I am going to download and install it in my lunch break.

Over the years, the emphasis of my site has changed a lot.

I started a personal site mainly to experiment with this new phenomenon. First I created a list with hyperlinks, mainly to sites about the Internet and sites about music.

After that I added some info about myself and started writing a sort of diary.

Later I was able to export data from my CD database, so everybody could see which CD’s I own. Besides experimenting with databases, I did this because I think that someone’s music preferences tells a lot about the person, and makes it easier to identify the writer.

Just before moving to Lleida, I created a completely new site with stories and photo’s from my life over here. Now, 20 months later, I am looking at my site, and feel that something is missing. This site does not swing, it does not rock and it does not dance. This site misses music!!!!

The only fragment of music on this site is the link to ApeSjit on my blogroll.

Listening to music is one of my greatest hobbies; the moment I come home I turn on the radio or put a CD. Since this site is about me, it needs music. Therefore I created a new category, so I will be stimulated to write about music.

In the future I will try to add my CD database again, but I want it to be completely automated, since the old solution needed a lot of manual copy and paste work. And maybe I will add the ‘Currently listening to’ feature so many other sites show.

This site is going to rock!!! :-D

The first half of my life I have been a big fan of Lego. And I guess that I still have a warm place in my heart for this construction toy, because I was immediately exited when I say the Mini-Mizer (Flash required), a tool to create your Lego alter-ego. I played around a little bit, and this is the result:

Does it look like me???

[Update 28.07.2003] MJ showed me better hair and a cooler t-shirt, so I updated the image.

I’ll be honest: this site is not receiving a lot of visitors.

Sometimes I have the feeling that I am the only one reading my texts. And I know exactly why. The main reason is that this site is not so interesting. And that is because I am not a great writer.

That sounds really pessimistic, but in my opinion it is realistic. My style of writing has been created at school; due to my education I mainly write down the ‘cold facts’, and try to use as less words as possible, while the sites I like to read are funny, well-written, poetic, …

The other problem this site suffers from is the subjects. I mainly write about two subjects: my life in Lleida, which is only interesting to the people who know me, and some technological news, which van also be found on a thousand other sites.

But I am like this, and this is my site. Even though not a lot of people are reading my writings, I really appreciate the people who do take the time to read it.

Because they are interested in my life now that I am living far away. Or because they are interested in some technological information I have been writing about (I hope that you could use the information I gave you). Or because they accidentally came here looking for something that is nor here (most people arriving on my site through a search engine are looking for Spanish curse words or serial numbers). No matter why they are visiting this site, I appreciate it.

But still, deep in my heart I keep hoping that one day this site will have a group of enthusiastic regular readers posting comments on the things I write.

To make this dream come true, I only have to do one thing: write better, more interesting texts. I’ve got work to do!

Movable Type is a great tool for creating personal sites (and some other types of sites as well), mainly due to its flexible template system and its many features like trackback, image upload & write functionality, sanitising,…

Regular readers (are there any?) of this site know that I did not need a lot of time to set up this site. However, I still keep on tweaking parts of the site to make it even better. It started with converting the templates from XHTML 1.0 to XHTML 1.1. After that I moved a little bit around with the different items shown on the pages, and adjusted the style sheet.

And soon I ran into the limits of Movable Type. Some things are simple not possible, are they? Fortunately, I am never the only one facing the limitations, and usually one of the guru’s out there solved the problem for me, always with a plugin.

Plugins are the feature making MT such a great tool. If MT cannot do it, there is always a plugin that can do it for you!!!

The following list describes the plugins I am using at the moment, and why I am using them:

BlogCopyright I could have created the functionality of this plugin by using a template module, but this is simply easier. BlogCopyright automatically creates the copyright message at the bottom of each page. It uses the year of the first and the last post and the author of the first message on the page. This means that I don’t have to change anything when we enter the year 2004.

ifEmpty This is more a programmers tool. It allows me to hide certain elements when they are empty. I use it in the definition of the file location of my Static Contents section. There, the category gives me the directory in which the file is placed. If there is no category, the file has to be placed in the root of the site.

macros Another tool to automate things. I use this plugin to create automatically the right code for some common abbreviations and acronyms. For example, MT becomes <abbr title=“Movable Type”>MT</abbr>. By the way, the macros are automatically created from a short list using the MTPerlScript plugin (idea shamelessly stolen from Mark Pilgrim).

otherblog Normally the sections are completely separated; you cannot access data like the name or the contents from an entry from outside a section. I am using a special section to manage my static contents, but would like to use some elements like the banner from my main section in the templates of the static contents. This plugin allows me to do this.

perlscript Again a very low-level plugin. This plugin allows me to execute Perl scripts from my templates. I use it to create my yearly archive pages, since MT only offers monthly archives. I am writing since 1997, so the list of monthly archives is way too long, therefore I created the yearly archive pages.

simplecomments There are two ways to react to my writings: you can leave a comment, or you can write about it on your own site and notify me using TrackBack. By default, MT keeps them separated, providing a list of comments and a list of trackbacks. In my point of view, comments and trackbacks are basically the same, but in different places. Therefore, I prefer to have a single comments list, with both the comments residing on my site as the comments written on other sites. SimpleComments does this for me.

smartypants Smartypants fixes the typographic punctuation of my entries. It converts straight quotes ( " and ’ ) into “curly” quote HTML entities, dashes (“–” and “–”) into en- and em-dash entities and three consecutive dots (“…”) into an ellipsis entity. Just to make it more perfect…

I just noticed that I have only written technical texts during the lasts weeks, and since this is a personal page, hereby a short update on my life:

Things are going regular. I am very busy at work, and go home to relax. Despite of the heat in the city, we manage to keep our house cool by blocking any ray of sun during the day (our 30 cm thick walls also help a lot…). In our free time, we mainly relax: in the sofa, on a terrace, in the cinema or in the swimming pool.

Not really special, and that certainly is the reason you haven’t read much about it.

A month ago, I wrote about the shortcomings of Internet Explorer and how this might stop innovation on the Internet in the coming years.

All over the web, people have expressed their worries, and a lot of web designers are afraid to have to deal with an obsolete browser for many many years. And of course, an action has been started to convince users to switch to another browser: Use a Better Browser. They ask site owners to place a button on their site, linked to a page explaining why other browsers are better than IE.

Although I agree with them that IE is quickly becoming a dinosaur, I don’t think that a button will let many users change their browser. However, they will change because of (lack of) features. If other browsers have features IE does not have, users might switch.

Therefore, the best way to convince IE-users to show them the tabbed browser interface and pop-up blocking of Mozilla and create sites using code that is not supported by IE.

Of course, degrade gracefully. Something as the position:fixed CSS property can serve for this purpose, for example for creating a floating navigation bar which will always be visible on the top of the screen. IE users will simply have to scroll up to navigate (as always), while visitors with newer browsers will have the benefits of having the navigation always at hand.

Other features that can be used to create better sites, are described in Eric Meyer’s css/edge. These won’t work on IE, but won’t make the page unusable.

So go ahead, design your pages using the latest coding possibilities, but degrade gracefully!!

A while ago, I explained how I configured the server to return HTTP Error 410: Gone for all requests for pages created with my old CMS.

After installing Movable Type, all pages of my site moved to another location, and I was not able to work out the new location of the files. In short, error 410 says: The requested file used to exist on this location, but it has gone to an unknown location. This message is more clear than the message returned by default; the famous 404.

I always check the server logs for 404 messages, since it might indicate that a link on the site is wrong and I’ll have to fix that. One of the files coming up regulary in that log is the default MT stylesheet styles-site.css, which I have replaced by my own stylesheet with a different name.

I immediately wanted to add this file to my ‘410–list’, but then I realised that 410 is not the correct code, since I do know where the file went.

Therefore a better solution would be to return code 301 (permanent redirect) together with the new location, so any smart client would simply redirect to the new address.

To implement this, I only needed to add a single line to the .htaccess file:

Redirect permanent /styles-site.css http://www.braintags.com/paz.css

This line tells the server to redirect requests for /styles-site.css with code ‘permanent’ to the file http://www.braintags.com/paz.css. Remember that the destination always has to be a complete URL!!

After yesterdays post I started playing more with Movable Type.

I decided to move some static content from my site to a separate section, as described by Brad Choate. At that moment, the only static content I had were the HTML error pages, displayed in case somebody asks a non-existing page. These pages were implemented as index templates, but with the new method I can treat them as normal texts without having to edit HTML code. I also decided to move the Stylesheet templates to the new section, since they are hardly ever updated.

After entering the texts for the error documents, I ran into a problem. I wanted to use almost the same templates as I am using for the rest of the site, but these templates make use of template modules (text snippets), which are linked to a specific section. So I started looking for a solution to display information from one section into another. And I found exactly what I was looking for: MTOtherBlog.

After this success I created some more static content (a Spambot trap), and fixed my search page with the MTOtherBlog plugin.

I am very happy with my MT static content solution. However, after this experience I realise that MT is not suited for the Fimcap site, since it has too much static content in a more complex directory structure. This would mean that we have to create a seperate category for every subcategory, which would make it difficult to manage.