brain tags Je Maintiendrai

Ego Watch

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

SyncML

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!

Synchronizing bookmarks

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!

New photo's

You might already have seen it, I added some new pictures to my photo gallery. You’ll see some typical tourist photos as well as some pictures of our bachelor day.

WAP revisited

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.

Firefox not preloading background images

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?

Comments disabled

I temporary disabled the comments on this site. The last days I have received too much comment spam.

Until two weeks ago, I could control comment spam by using the MT-Blacklist plug-in. Unfortunately this plug-in does not work on the latest version of Movable Type, so I had to remove it. MT 3.0D has the option to require commenters to sign up first before posting a comment, but I have not yet been able to get the JavaScript to work on XHTML 1.1. Until I fix this, I simply keep a close eye on my comments, and remove any suspicious comment immediately. But the coming week I will be on a trip, and thus can’t watch my comments. Therefore I decided to disable the comments until I am back home again. If you have any comment, just use the Feedback form.

Windows 3.1

Last week when I entered my hotel room and switched on the light, the TV turned on and showed me a welcome message explaining how to use Pay TV. First I did not pay any attention to this screen, and I started unpacking my bags. When I passed the TV for about the fifth time, I suddenly saw something I did not notice before. On the top of the screen I could see a blue bar with some letters below it. I was amazed. The welcome message was simply a text file written in Write, and the whole system appeared to be running Windows 3.1!!!

It has been a long time ago since I last saw Windows 3.1 in use. I thought that everybody had already switched a long time ago to Windows 9x, but it seems that there are still some of these legacy systems around. Surely the system is running good enough, so why change it?

Snails

It was that famous weekend again: the Aplec del Caragol. I won’t go into details, but after two days of eating and drinking I feel tired, dirty, and have pain in my stomach.

Cyprus

The next week I don’t expect to write many things.

This morning I will be leaving for Cyprus —I will be flying over Amsterdam!!!— where I will stay until Sunday. I will have meetings with four companies over there and am going to try to teach them as much as possible about our main programs.

Bye!

Dry season

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?

I'm a billionaire

A little bit more than a year ago, I entered the fantasy blog shares market with exactly B$500. As of today I may call myself a virtual billionaire, since the total of my virtual possessions passed B$1.000.000.000!!! Now let’s see if I can do the same with real money…

[Update 2004.05.19]: OK, I deserved it! Directly after writing this entry I took some losses, which brought my virtual wealth down to B$967.000.000. Back to work!!!

PageRank

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.

The Cops Are Chasing Me in a WHAT?

If you are thinking about speeding on Italian highways this year, think twice. You might find yourself being chased by a Lamborghini. Italian police took possession Friday of a sleek, 500 horsepower, two-seater Lamborghini Gallardo, which can hit a top speed of 185 miles per hour.

Product search

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.

The first days with MT 3.0D

Four days ago I upgraded the motor of this site to Movable Type version 3.0D — the D is for Developer edition. Unlike many others who installed this version, I was fully aware that this developer edition could have some problems with plug-ins. Here are my findings of the first days playing around.

Dashboard
The first screen of the MT interface clearly shows a new item: the Movable Type News box. This box syndicates news from the Movable Type web site. Since I prefer to read my news in my feed reader, I immediately removed this box.
Another thing changed in the main screen is the direct access to some weblog features. The 2.x versions had for each weblog links to create a new entry and to enter the entries list. Now you can also access the comments list, the templates list and the weblog configuration screen. The one thing I am missing here is the upload file feature, since I assume that bloggers will more often upload an image than tinker with their templates.

Edit Entry
Also the Entry Edit screen has some —minor— modifications. It is now possible to specify the entry date & time the moment you create a new entry. In the older versions you first had to save your entry to modify the publishing time. That leaves only one feature that cannot be modified in new entries: the multiple categories. Another change is that the edit buttons now also work in Mozilla based browsers, but only for the entry body. If you use the extended entry field, you still have to enter the HTML code yourself.

Comments
The comments list is new and handy feature to manage your comments. You can see the details and the status of the last comments, and open them from that screen. You can filter comments on e-mail, name and IP address, but unfortunately not on status. I don’t receive many comments, but I assume that more popular sites would love to see only the comments that are pending for approval.

Trackback
In my definition, trackbacks are nothing more than comments on my entries left on other sites. I would like to treat trackbacks in exactly the same way as comments, but unfortunately trackbacks do not have status information.

Plug-ins
Of the 13 plug-ins I use for this site, I removed two after upgrading. MT-Blacklist is not compatible with MT3.0, so I am removing comment spammers by hand again.
The Optional-Redirect plug-in is not necessary anymore, since the same can be achieved in MT 3.0 by no_redirect="1". All other plug-ins work the same way as before.

Individual Archive template
Most of my time went into trying to adjust the individual archive template. There have been many changes to this template to incorporate the TypeKey service, but I have not yet been able to get them to work when served as XHTML 1.1 with MIME type application/xhtml+xml. The smallest problem was to validate the template as XHTML 1.1. The new code uses some names, which I changed into ids, and I had to edit lib/MT/Template/Context.pm so it won’t use valign and border anymore — look at line 1476.
A bigger problem is the JavaScript. Things like document.comments_form.email.value is easy enough changed into document.getElementById('email').value, but I don’t know how to fix document.write so it works both on text/html as on application/xhtml+xml. The last problem I have with my template is that it shows the wrong comment form; the one that is normally used when TypeKey authentication is obligatory. I still have to find out what is going wrong here.

Internet radar

The radar is a handy and necessary tool in the aviation business. A long time ago, when there was not much trafic, there was no need for a radar; for the people in the control towers it was enough to have visual contact with the airplane the moment it arrived. But as trafic increased more sophisticated systems were needed. Nowadays all incoming and outgoing planes appear on the radar screens, unless they fly too low.

Exactly the same is happening on the internet. Ten years ago, it was easy enough to surf the few interesting sites on a weekly basis. But as the internet grew and more sites started to publish more material, this became a kludge. I am interested in the content of about 100 sites, which I try to read on a regulary basis. Some of these sites publish daily news, some of them are only updated once a month. Four years ago I had my bookmarks ordered by update frequency: I had a folder called ‘daily’ which contained sites I tried to visit on daily basis, etc. But as the number of sites increased, it became undoable to keep on visiting all those sites.

So I started using the internet equivalent of the radar: feed readers. Most sites publish their content in several formats. Besides the usual HTML pages, many sites also publish their news in a short format as RSS or Atom. My feed reader fetches those so-called feeds every X minutes, and notifies me when a site has been updated. This saves me a lot of time! But there are still many sites flying under the radar. Sites that do not provide feeds, sites which I still have to visit manually, many times only to find out that nothing has changed. I found out that I am visiting these sites less and less. They are about to dissapear from my screen, I simply do not have the time to keep on visiting them.

And I am not the only one. Many people read the texts of this site through a feed reader, and even more use my feeds to see whether I updated my site. So webmasters: don’t fly under the radar, but give your readers the option to use feed readers!

Movable Type 3.0

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.

Remove Movable Type News box

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">).