Ennovy.org

Wow, I haven’t posted in this blog for a year now!

I would love to rehaul the entire site, get rid of all the broken stuff. But I don’t have the motivation to do it.

I used to get a lot of comment spam on this weblog. 99.9% of them were caught and so they never showed up in the comments, but I still had to delete the comments in the control panel. In the last couple of months the comment spam has died down to nothing. I was congratulating myself for solving this comment spam problem (although it’s really EE’s security features and Loweblog’s Akismet module that should get all the credit) when I realized that in the last couple of months I had turned on the option to close comments after 30 days. So obviously I wouldn’t get any comment spam if no one can post comments! And I rarely make public posts these days.

A few weeks ago, I switched to the beta version of the new My Yahoo, a personalized portal page. They’ve added a couple of new features, including more customization options and more content. I’m using it as my home page, same as I’ve done for years now, but there are a couple of things that bug me.

In the old version, there was something called the “Message Center”, which I had on the top left corner of the page. It told me whether I had any new mail in my Yahoo account, and it was really quite handy. If I did have mail, then I could sign into the Yahoo mail.

In the new version, it’s been replaced with something called the “Personal Assistant”. Except it’s not a replacement. This new Personal Assistant tells me if I have new mail only if I’m logged in. If I’m not, then it tells me to sign in. Which makes it useless!

Then there’s the fact that this Personal Assistant seems to be stuck on the right side of the page. I can’t move it around like I can with all of the other items on the page.

Lastly it sticks an advertisement into the middle of my links:

Note: I wrote this post because I wanted to test out the screen-capture abilities of Skitch. And I felt like whining.

I’ve updated the CSS for the control panel themes to match with EE 1.6.0. There have been no changes to the images, just to the css file. If you notice anything off, let me know!

I haven’t actually upgrade this site to EE 1.6 yet. I installed a fresh version of EE 1.6 on my computer to play around first. Before I update this site, I still need to make sure all of my extensions/plugins don’t break. Then I need to reconcile some hacks I made to the default plugins. Then I have to update my Control panel theme because it looks like the style sheet in the new version got some new updates. I’m planning on starting on all of that this weekend!

My worries about running out of bandwidth last month came true – I ran out of bandwidth on February 26, and my site was down for 3 days.

Here’s a graph:

This first few days of March have been quite cold. There was a snow storm on Thursday, with freezing rain in the evening. We ended up getting the afternoon off at work to avoid the bad weather/traffic. On Friday, there were quite a few areas without power, but luckily my house and my workplace had power. Friday afternoon, it snowed heavily much like the previous day, and we got the afternoon off again. Except the snow stopped in about half an hour, so there wasn’t really any need to leave early. I’m really looking forward to spring/summer!

It’s not even the middle of February yet, and I’m at 79% of my bandwidth limit. This is a first.

I’ve closed off comments on older entries, and trackbacks too, hopefully that will slow down all of the spam attempts. I’ll also edit my robots.txt file and stop bots from crawling my site.

If I go over my bandwidth limit, it costs $0.50 US per gigabyte to keep the site up, and even though that’s not bad, I don’t want to have to pay that. So if my site looks like it’s being suspended later this month, you’ll know what happened.

Bandwidth in November/Dec 06

( More Screenshots )

Since I made a post about decorating my desktop, I thought I’d make another one for decorating a website.

If you want to spruce up your site for the holidays, here are some links:

• Seasonal Elf and Santa Smilies from Connie at Schildieproductions. Also, check out the Santa smilies and the Winter and Christmas Smilies.
• Christmas Holiday Icons from N. Design Studio.
• Falling Snow effect using javascript from Dynamic Drive.
• Create some Christmas graphics by following the Christmas Photoshop Tutorials.
• Add a realistic-looking Santa hat to your photos.

Research :: Documents
Chuck :: dooce’s dog
Insert :: Delete
Bang :: Big
Lousy :: Lame
Rehearsal :: Dress
Critics :: Bash
Memory :: RAM
Squid :: Ink
Remove :: Junk

(from Unconscious Mutterings)

After reading this post which explains how to get the TextMate blogging bundle to work with ExpressionEngine, I decided to try it out for myself. I’ve been able to retrieve previous posts from my blog already, let’s hope that I can post this entry to my blog!

Edit: Yay! It worked! Except that my mood custom field is messed up.

( Read More... )

Wow, it’s been a while since I’ve posted here.

This evening I found out from Webhostingtalk that the Swedish domain registry (.se) is giving away free .se domain registrations until December 31, 2006. It seems similar to the free .be domains from last year. However, there is a catch – you can only get a free internationalized domain name. Internationalized domain names (see ICANN for the technical details) have non-ASCII characters in the URL.

This was the first time I’d heard of internationalized domain names. It’s so cool – you can not only have domain names that aren’t english like 愛我.com (which is chinese) or parlez-français.com, but also domain names like smile☺.com. (Note: none of the domains have been registered yet, so the links don’t work.) And now there is a much bigger pool of domain names to choose from.

There are some downsides. Not all browsers support it – for example IE 6 doesn’t. To get it recognized on browsers and other programs, the characters are converted to punycode. When converted to punycode, the resulting URLs look rather ugly to me. If I were to register español.com, the resulting URL in punycode would be xn—habla-espaol-jhb.com. And if I were to get an email from one of those domains and I can only see the punycode translation, I’d think it would look quite spammy. (Note: all of the translations have an “xn—” prefix, so that’s a good way to recognize them.)

Back to the free .se domains. I am not planning on registering one. I once registered a .info domain when those were being offered for free, and I did absolutely nothing with it, and just let it expire after the first year was over.

But, that hasn’t stopped me from thinking up witty domain names all evening:

databå.se. This was the first one that popped into my head. I wanted something that looked readable like English, but with the a, o, u, and e characters replaced with å,ä, ö, ü, or é. According to this, they’re needed to satisfy the internationalized domain name requirement and they are the only non-english characters allowed. But after thinking about it, it’s not a good name, because there are multiple spelling variations: dåtåbå.se, dätäbä.se, dätaba.se, and so on.

süppö.se, mörö.se. löö.se, impö.se. I like these. The letter “a” isn’t in any of these so it’s less ambiguous as you don’t have to remember whether to use å or ä.

öbé.se. Umm. I asked my brother to think of some words and that’s what he came up with. The accent on the e would make me pronounce the word wrong though. Same with whitérö.se.

pöi.se, pörpöi.se, türtöi.se. Argh, I really like these.

I could go on!

You are welcome to register any of the above, if you like. And if you have any good suggestions, comment! I want to hear them.

This is embarrassing. For the last few days, I have been unable to access my EE control panel. I have the control panel home page bookmarked, and whenever I tried to access the page, I’d see the page loading for less than a second, and then I’d get automatically redirected to the Google homepage.

At first I thought it was a bug or a glitch, so I cleared out my browser’s cache and restarted the browser. That didn’t work. The same thing happened when I tried accessing the control panel in Safari and Internet Explorer. With Safari I was logged in via cookies, and with Internet Explorer, I wasn’t, but that didn’t make a difference.

Then I realized that I couldn’t access my Mint control panel either, it also redirected me to Google.

My next thought was maybe someone had hacked my php files, and added in some redirecting code to it. Or to my .htaccess file. I checked those, and I didn’t find anything.

At this point I was annoyed and out of ideas, so I ignored the problem for a day or two, hoping that it would just go away. It didn’t.

Finally, and this took me a few days, I realized that even though I couldn’t access the EE control panel home page, I could access the other parts of the control panel, such as the Admin page or the My Account page. So, it must be something in the Mint control panel page and the EE control panel home page that was causing this.

It turned out to be something I had written, an extension for EE and a custom Pepper for Mint. They both do the same thing, that being displaying the recent searches made in EE. And someone had made the following search:

The search term contained a link to a javascript file, and the contents of the javascript file was just one simple line which directed anyone who loaded that javascript to Google:

Scary hmm?

When displaying the recent searches, I was simply pulling the search terms from the database and outputting them raw, without bothering to check whether or not there was any malicious code in there. So when I tried to access the page, the javascript file was loaded and I got redirected to Google.

It could have been worse than just a simple redirect too. The javascript could have contained much more nasty code.

To get my control panel home page back, I edited my php code and added an htmlspecialchars function around the search terms. It works, but there’s probably more I could do to make sure this and other similar things doesn’t happen again.

And, I found that if you do a search for this domain in google, you can see that my site isn’t the only one that this has happened to.

I disabled captchas on this blog today and installed the Akismet extension for ExpressionEngine. It worked beautifully, and stopped about 82 comment spams on my blog in 6 hours. None made it onto the blog. I was surprised to see such a high number! The captchas work just as well – I got maybe 2 comment spams in the last year while using it, and they were done manually – but with the Akismet extension, it makes things more accessible.

Something weird is happening to my site. It looks like EE is not reading the templates as text files but reading them from the database. Which is not good, because the template data I have in the database is OLD.

I really want to figure out what happened, but I need to get some sleep… arghhh….

So if you find the site messed up, that’s the reason, and it’ll have to wait until tomorrow until I can figure out what happened..