some smaller steps
It always amazes me how much time I have to waste in trying to get tech-stuff (such as this weblog) working the way I want. You will barely notice it but again I spend too much time delving in PHP-scripts, sometimes with minor success, most of the time almost wrecking this weblog…
An example : it took me a day to figure out why this page said there was just 1 visitor online whereas log files showed otherwise. The PHP-script I used checked this by looking at the IP-address via REMOTEADDR_ which is perfectly OK on an ordinary Mac OS 10.3 machine, but not on an OS X-Server! For some reason it gives as the REMOTEADDR just the IP address of the Server (that is, www.matrix.ua.ac.be in this case) so whoever came by this page got tagged as 143.129.75.209 and so the script thought there was just one person around… The trivial way around it is changing every occurence of REMOTEADDR by HTTPPCREMOTEADDR_. Easy enough but it took me a while to figure it out.
Another example : over the week-end this weblog got a stalker! There were over 100 hits from 38.113.198.9, so whoever that is really liked this site but didn't have time to read a thing… Again, the standard solution is to ban the IP-address and most weblog-packages have such a tool on their admin-page. But whathever I tried and Googled WordPress doesn't seem to have it on board. There were a few hacks and plugins around claiming to do something about it but none of them worked! So, I tried more drastic actions such as editing .htaccess files which I thought would solve everything (again, no problem under 10.3 but not under 10.3-Server!). Once more, a couple of hours lost trying to figure out how to get the firewall of a Mac-Server do what I needed. The upshot is that I know now all dark secrets of the ipfw command, so no more stalking around this site…
In the process of grounding my stalker, I decided that I needed better site-stats than my homemade log-file provided. Fortunetely, this time I picked a package that worked without too much hassle (one more time I had to make the REMOTEADDR substitution but apart from that all went well). You will see not too much of the power of this stats-package on the page (apart from the global counter), I feel that such things are best forgotten until something strange occurs (like stalkers, spammers and other weirdos). A nice side-effect though was that for the first time I had a look at _referring pages, that is the URL leading to this weblog. Lots of Google searches (some strange ones) but today there were also a number of referrals from a Chinese blog. I checked it out and it turned out to be the brand new Math is Math! Life is Life! weblog…
Another time consuming thing was getting the BBC-news RSS feeds working in the sidebar, so that you still get some feel for reality while being trapped here. I am not yet satisfied with the layout under Explorer, but then everyone should move on to Safari (so I did give up trying to work out the PHP-script).
But most time I wasted on something that so far has left no trace whatsoever here. A plugin that allows specific posts to be read only by registered users (of a certain 'level', that is WordPress can give users a level from 0 to 10 with specific degrees of freedom). But clearly at the same time I wanted the rest of the world to have at least some indication of what they were missing (such as a title with a nice padlock next to it) but so far I didn't get it working. The only trace of a closed posting would be in the sidebar-listing of the ten last posts but gives an error message when an unauthorized user clicks on it. So, still a lot of headache-sensitive work left to do, but it is about time to get back to mathematics…
update (febr. 2007) : the padlock-idea is abandoned.