Brief Outage

February 1st, 2006

Sorry for the brief outage today - apparently a couple of my domains have been getting a huge amount of spam lately (in the multi-gigabyte range) which caused the disk space to run out in this particular partition. If you notice any other weird SQL errors, or such, be sure to let me know.

Tags: site, server

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Using Wordpress

April 4th, 2005

I've updated the web site to use Wordpress and essentially duplicate the functionality of the old site (with some nice new features). In order to do this, I looked to a couple, handy, plugins:

• WP-Tags - As a warning, there's a couple modules with this name, this particular one happens to work the best. You can easily apply tags to any post or page in Wordpress and display relevant tag information on the sidebar of your site.
• Touched - This plugin provides in-line post editing capabilites, using Ajax. I'm going to tweak it some to fit my needs, but it's an excellent start.

The rest of the modifications that I made are (currently) pretty hackish. For example, in Wordpress, you can only browse by category (or date, or tag) for the whole web log, not for just a particular category. I had to go through and modify all the functions to display current post information based upon the active category, instead of globally. Additionally, I wanted tags to be much more useful then they currently were - in the RSS feeds for the web site, for example, I provide multiple categories (one for each tag) - I had to modify the code to handle that. If anyone is interested in the changes that I made, and using it for their web log, let me know and I'll see what I can provide.

I'm still in the process of synchronizing my del.icio.us links with my links page, but that's not entirely urgent.

Update: By the way, the design is still very rough - I'm just running off of a template that I found - it'll soon be something much better, I hope.

Tags: programming, php, site, blogs, wordpress

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Project Updates

March 20th, 2005

Even though I was terribly busy, I still managed to make a number of project updates this weekend. Most of the updates were just writing up some documentation and getting them out the door, but that's something.

• FOAF Layout - Did a possible FOAF layout for Bob Aman. I wanted a clean, concise, layout which downgraded nicely (and even had a little bit of Javascript flare).
• Log Session Analyis - Analyzes Apache logs looking for all unique sessions that occur. Also grabs a bunch of other fun stuff (such as number of people reading RSS feeds.
• Dom Snap - Make two DOM objects 'snap' to each other and move around together.
• Finally wrote some documentation for three of my Perl Modules, and put them up on CPAN: Net::Netflix, Net::Amazon::DVD2IMDB, and Net::DVDProfiler. I hope to package up a couple other modules and get them out the door here soon.

Also, I've moved this site over to a new server (which is also hosting juniperbay.com, amoungst other things). It's terribly nice - hopefully the uptime will be much better then my old server.

Tags: apache, javascript, perl, modules, projects, site

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Site Moved

February 17th, 2005

I've successfully finished moving the web site from my user account at CSH over to ejohn.org (a domain which I've owned now for over half a decade). (Sorry to all those reading my RSS feed for the extra flush of entries)

It's an exciting time for this web site. I'm now receiving 200-250 unique visitors per day and am constantly adding new and exciting content. This makes me happy because I think I've finally hit the sweet-spot when it comes to updating my site with information. I have about four more projects that I'm going to release here in the next couple days, so you can look forward to that. Additionally, I'm going to try digging up and putting online my old portfolio, TI-83 programs, my journal, and various seminars.

I'm hoping to add some new features to the site here soon, including comments and some more personalized index pages. Whenever I feel that my content application (TagCMS) is ready enough for the real-time, I'll release it for people to play around with. If it's helped me to keep an updated web site, then I'm sure it's capable of helping anyone.

I was just approved for a Independent Study this next quarter, working on an application called Multichat - it's a rather exciting adaptation of Webnote which adds the functionality of real-time discussion into the mix. In the meantime, however, I'm really looking forward to break and being able to get a lot of work done.

Tags: site

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Old Projects Added

February 9th, 2005

I added a number of old projects last night that were long overdue for release. A list of them can be found below:

• AI::Markov - The Markov Model Perl module that I wrote when I was on co-op in the Lab for Applied Computing last year.
• CSH Interview Management - The web application that I wrote for CSH members to manage the new member interview process.
• Latent Semantic Indexing - An implementation of Latent Semantic Indexing that I wrote for Data Mining class.
• POE::Component::XOSD - A Perl module that can be used to run a threaded XOSD process.
• RIT SIS Account Query - A Perl library for connecting to the RIT SIS application and retreiving personal information.
• RIT SIS Query - Another Perl library for connecting to the RIT SIS application and retreiving course information.
• RIT Schedule of Courses Scraper - A Perl module and script that can be used to scrape the course listing of RIT.
• Soccer Comm Protocol - An idea that Chris and I tossed around last year.
• Template Presentation - A lightweight XML-based presentation utility written in Perl, while I was working in the LAC.

I only have about three to five projects left which I have to add information for and once that's complete the projects section of this web site will be up to date. While compiling all of these projects I've been rather surprised at just how many I've written over the years. I wish I had time to go back through them and fix bugs/write documentation, but I'll have to take it as they come.

Tags: programming, projects, site

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RSS Error

January 27th, 2005

Sorry to everyone reading my RSS feed (on LiveJournal), I noticed a bug which was making the feed display everything (including links, projects and blog posts). I've modified it to to display only the correct category. If you're interested in subscribing to the feeds, the information is as follows:

• Blog Posts - I post every couple days, generally speaking. Generally tech-related.
• Projects - I add new projects to this feed, updated about once a week.
• Links - Links that I find to be interesting, I update multiple times a day with anywhere from 5-20 links.

I hope that clears some things up, sorry about all the mess! (btw, the links and projects feeds currently don't have LiveJournal feeds, so if you have a paid account, please make one!)

Tags: rss, site

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Site Updates Complete

January 14th, 2005

I've managed to finish up a number of updates to the web site. There is significantly more content, a number of RSS feeds, and a number of projects to download.

There are about 20 projects left that I still need to dig up the code for and they will be going up very soon. Until then, feel free to browse the projects that are available, there's over 40 that I have filled in information for, thus far.

In order to get my web log to appear in the new Technorati Tag Search I had to submit a bug fix for XML::RSS that would allow for multiple categories (due to the multiple tag system used on my site). I may release the engine that I'm using to run it, currently called TagCMS, but it'll require a lot of cleaning up.

Tags: site

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