Category: Burningbird

Known universe

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date February 28, 2007

I’m not sure why I’m getting 404 log entries for pages that WordPress serves. The material that mentions this online this seems confused. If anyone has any suggestions, I have ears enough.

I think I have all my redirects, other than managing a 401 document, which Phil suggested. That’s what’s causing the conflict between WordPress’ htaccess that ate the world and authenticated subdirectories.

I have too many categories, and need to merge these, and also provide redirects when I do. That’s the number one reason NOT to use categories in permalinks. Oh well, life needs challenges.

What I also need to do is create 410 gone entries in my .htaccess file for the permanently removed resources. Until finished, and until I recover from my merge, people will have to suffer through my 404 page.

Burningbird Technology

The wonders of S3

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date February 27, 2007

The only domains I’m keeping are burningbird.net, shelleypowers.com, and missourigreen.com. Burningbird is my major site, I’m turning the shelleypowers.com into an online CV, resume, what have you, and developing MissouriGreen more fully.

One unique feature of Missouri Green is that most of the site resources will be hosted on Amazon’s S3. I’ve already tried out S3 for a Flash-based photo show, and it works remarkably well. I figure that I can offload everything but the dynamic applications, such as whatever tool I use for the content. I’m leaning towards Drupal right now for the content. Drupal or WordPress most likely.

I’m using a variation of a Python script to bulk load to S3 from my server, but it needs work. I’m also using the Firefox add-on, S3 Firefox Organizer for loads from my desktop.

I’ve been enjoying myself immensely but I have to watch it: I’m almost up to a dollar in monthly charges.

Since S3 is a third party service, I’m not making it my key storage device. My photos I upload I have in RAW format on external hard drive and backup DVD. Same with the database dumps, as well as the code. If Amazon decides to enforce a minimum charge, or the service become less than robust, I have a plan to programatically recover the data and host elsewhere.

Writing

Short takes

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date February 27, 2007

The editing process can be fraught with possibilities for humor, especially when looking at typos. In one example, the text of the sample web site talked about “Poor the margarita into a glass”, leading to expressions of sympathy from my editors. My favorite so far, though, is “Transversing collections of data..” instead of “Traversing collections of data…”.

Alternate lifestyle code, indeed.

I’d already found the occurrence of “can’t” misspelled with a ‘u’ before sending it off for editing. Good thing, too, as editors never let you forget slips like this. Ever.

Speaking of geekery, OpenID is now the new cat’s jammies. For those new to this darling, all you really need is a bit of open source software and a URI, and it magically opens doors for you everywhere. I had an OpenID URI once but found it too blasè. I know what I really want, but unfortunately, iamgod.com, is already taken.

Burningbird

Moved

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date February 26, 2007

You can never keep an old bird down…

The mass weblog integration has been made, but not without a lot of problems. Most of the category associations were lost, and since I used categories as part of the permalinks, posts will end up with a new permalink that doesn’t map to the old. The only way to fix this will be to manually edit the posts.

WordPress also sets up the .htaccess file in such a way that if a subdirectory is protected with .htaccess authentication, such as my Adding Ajax review directory, it intercedes and wants to fulfill the request. In the .htaccess file, two conditions check to see if the object being accessed exists as a file or a directory. If it does, the request is passed through; if it doesn’t WordPress assumes it’s one of its pages.

However, an authentication request is neither a file nor a directory, and these ended up triggering WP processing.

I found that several other people had this problem, but I’m using workaround which seems to work well. Once the book review is over, I won’t have a password protected subdirectory and can get rid of it.

The site design: simple. My main interest was reducing the amount of white in the text area, providing a site that could display photos, and I wanted to incorporate Hubble images. The banner has a changing Hubble image, which of course you have to click through to see if you’re reading this in a syndication feed.

Speaking of which, these are all redirected, and should show up in your aggregators.

This is brand new, and I only have so much time with the work on the book. Please be patient while I work through the kinks, but do let me if there’s a problem.

Burningbird Diversity

End of the week

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date February 24, 2007

hadn’t planned on jumping on to this year’s seemingly annual look at the appalling state of women in technology, as painfully demonstrated at tech conferences. It’s a subject I’ve lost a lot of heart in fighting–not because there are fewer women then ever before, but because too few people seem to think this is a problem.

The issue of women in technology will never be effectively solved, or even fought, within weblogs. I think weblogging is actually counterintuitive to true social change. If I continue to work for change, and that’s a big if now, I’ll do so outside of the weblogs.

So why did I respond to Eric? It seemed like the marketable thing to do.

I’ll leave the comments open for a few days on the post, but remember, none of these posts are being migrated to the new weblog; none of the new posts and the new comments. Feel free to copy what you want, but I’ve already made my snapshot. Don’t want to waste your good words, but I definitely don’t want to go through another WordPress weblog merge.