A view from the hill - Blog

Blog update

nospam@example.com (Holger Schauer) — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 10:56:42 +0200

My blog provider, 1on.de decided some time ago that the domains they previously provided like .bugwriter.net, will be nuked and all content will be moved to the 1on.de domain. As a result, the canonical domain for this blog is now hillview.1on.de. I didn't really mind as the old URL is still valid. But I know started to realize that the transition did come with a price: for instance, the tag plugin stopped working correctly, you didn't get any tag selected but instead ended up on the default start page. The reason was that the tag plugin still pointed to hillview.bugwriter.net which then got redirected to the new URL. Another problem is that several articles contain links to older articles of mine and of course have absolute and now no longer reasonable URLs as targets. Replacing these will take some time.

In other news you may already have seen that I've embedded a piece of Javascript from the fanclub of Ursula von der Leyen (Zensursula). It's just a gimmick and a little annoying, but hey, that's what UvdL is all about. Update:I've disabled the gimmick after the german election.

Blog update

nospam@example.com (Holger Schauer) — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 20:59:47 +0200

As you might have noticed, the software (serendipity) behind this blog has been updated, resulting in several new features. I'm not sure yet if I'll keep the ranking functionality (too few readers anyway to be useful), but the tags are unlikely to go away soon.

Update: as you might have noticed, the tags haven't been to stable. Automatic keyword parsing has have its unfortunate side effects. There still might be some wrong tags. Update2: And all categories are gone. Hooray. :-((

Ah, and the provider is now called weblog-writer.net instead of 1on.de.

How to kill 10000 trackbacks

nospam@example.com (Holger Schauer) — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 11:39:40 +0200

I've been on holidays for two weeks. And come back to find roughly ten thousand trackbacks. And of course, all notification mails were whitelisted, so I had ten thousand insane mails as well. Oh well. The mails weren't a problem. mailfilter is quite a handy tool. But what was quite awful was killing the trackbacks in serendipity. A lot of them came from a common IP, but Firefox wasn't able to handle the enourmous page length that resulted from showing roughly five thousand comments. Using syllables such as "er" or "sl" in the URL filter I was able to partition the comments in sets so that Firefox would display the comments totally, so that I could then reverse the selection and kill the comments.
What is really annoying though is that one can't filter on an IP basis in the anti-spam criteria. Perhaps this is just a missing feature in the version 1on.de (my blog hoster) is using. Speaking of which, that I still can't post to their forum (no login) and that there is no e-mail contact at all isn't exactly making me happy.

The downside of trackbacks

nospam@example.com (Holger Schauer) — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 21:49:51 +0100

... is spam, of course. And I'm only on one blogging network (technorati). Can't believe I get that much spam as I do, but I do. A lot of spam pointed to some (probably hijacked) server in *.edu, but their admins are going to fix that. Not that one less really helps a lot.

Foggy view from the hill

nospam@example.com (Holger Schauer) — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 22:07:57 +0100

Not only the weather is foggy, but life in general. I'm currently drowning in work, which means that I feel far to lame to work on my UCW hobby project, and even more so wrt. to blogging. So, the downtime of my blog isn't really responsible for the lack of new content.

Technocrati profile

nospam@example.com (Holger Schauer) — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 23:15:44 +0100

Look here: Technorati Profile

A view from the hill

nospam@example.com (Holger Schauer) — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 00:11:02 +0100

Welcome. Although this blog suddenly appeared, you might wonder why there are already articles in it. No, they weren't published before, only edited in a local Serendipity installation. As you might infer from the categories, this blog is likely to contain mainly computer-related stuff with the occasional bit of life thrown in for good measure. In case you're wondering about the blog's title, it's named after an old song by the Chameleons.

Totally unrelated, I'm wondering why the editor buttons don't work for me in this installation of Serendipity. My local installation works fine. Hmm.

Wrong password when previewing an entry?

nospam@example.com (Holger Schauer) — Fri, 28 Apr 2006 11:37:42 +0200

After typing a lengthy entry, I hit the preview button and serendipity complains about a wrong password? WTF? And of course, the entry has disappeared. Thank you, Serendipity, you really just pissed me off.