mu.nu - "My Tamagotchi!" she said. "It has to poop."

May 05, 2005

Comments remembering info

Rusty posted earlier about the comments section remembering your information. I started playing with the templates and using his code and the code posted at Eric's Grumbles, I was able to get the Individual Archive Posts working. But I wasn't able to get the pop-up comments window to remember the information.

Being 99% OCD and 100% Geek it bothered me that I couldn't figure it out. Then it hit me, after I finished rubbing my head I tested out my thought.

The problem is the:

var HOST = <$MTBlogHost$>;
line in the code.

If you change this in line in both the Comment Listing template and the Individual Archive Template to:

var HOST = 'mu.nu';

It saves the information and it’s readily accessible. Now for the nifty part: It remembers the information for any of the mu.nu blogs you visit.

Hopefully this helps.
Later,
phin

Posted by: phin at 08:07 PM | Comments (31) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Time to Vote

A month ago the Rocket Jones Banner Contest was announced. Entries are now up, and they're pretty darned cool. Now it's time to choose your favorite by leaving a comment.

Thanks.

Posted by: Ted at 11:05 AM | Comments (12) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

May 04, 2005

THE MAN got another one

Why do businesses fear bloggers? I really wish I knew.

8 Z E R O 8 just lost his job for having a blog. An anonymous coworker who knew about his blog notified the aristocracy and they came down on him like a ton of bricks.

If you know of any journalism positions open, maybe you can hook him up. He's in Houston but is willing to relocate. Hell, he's probably dying to relocate. We're talking Houston here. (Hah!)

If not, just stop by and say "Hey" or perhaps hit his tip jar. I know both of those things meant the world to me when I got shafted laid off.

Posted by: Jim at 08:03 PM | Comments (11) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Dyndns.org

If I try to go to the root domain of any of the trackback spam I've been getting in the last couple of months (and I've been getting a lot), I get redirected to dyndns.org:

"Dynamic Network Services, Inc. is a leading provider of Domain Name Services (DNS). We provide full managed DNS hosting, Dynamic DNS, Static DNS, web redirection, e-mail, and domain registration services. Maintaining 100.000% DNS uptime with over a million users, we offer the flexibility, support, and service to ensure a strong and reliable presence on the Internet for you or your business."

Could we somehow ban trackbacks to any sites hosted by dyndns.org?

Posted by: David Boxenhorn at 09:08 AM | Comments (8) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

May 02, 2005

Mailman problem

We're having problems with the Mailman mailing list utility. Earlier this weekend it was bouncing back anything sent to it. It's not bouncing emails anymore but it isn't sending them to the mailinglist or putting them into the message archive.

I'm guessing this is more breadcrumbs from that cPanel update?

Posted by: Jim at 07:32 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

MuNubies!

Well, there seems to be no official announcement up yet. Which makes me wonder how Ted got the scoop on the new class of Munuvians. (I'm guessing that it was the automated blogroll...?)

Anywho, I've been perusing the Munubies. Give a warm MuNu welcome to S. Faolan Wolf of Nomen Est Omen. This gal likes to, shall we say, vent, and she's got the gift of kvetch.

Then there's Maria of Hatshepsut. Munuvia expands into Iceland! Woo Hoo! Maria might not get it, but there's something very alluring about a gal who dresses in red and black, likes Star Trek, studies religeons (is partial to Judaism), has lived in several differant countries and studied several differant languages and who hates cold weather and opts to live in frickin' Reykjavik. So, please give Maria a very VERY warm welcome!

Next up is my own nominee: Angry In T.O. of Angry In The Great White North. I first read him through a link from Debbye, and saw that he'd been linked by Michelle Malkin and Captain Ed, as well. AiTO is a must read for all the new news on Canadian politics and the big picture.

Then there's USAdave of American Geek. He's got links to, and commentary on, news of the day that you might not have noticed elsewhere. And he's a Peggy Noonan reader! (Peggy's style of writing is what inspired me to begin blogging, myself.) Go give USAdave a "hielow"!

Kyer of Whatsakyer has also been assimilated. Some pointed international news blogging with an interesting focus on Equador. That's new! I've read all of the posts that are up thus far and can't figure out if Kyer is male or female. Aah, mystery. So, like, how many licks does it take to get to the center of a Toosie Roll Pop and what's a Kyer? The world may never know...

Phin's Blog, Oorgo Blog, Smiling Dynamite (love that name!), Ogre's Politics And Views and Camp HappyFunBad have yet to complete the move. But, Phin and Oorgo have a post up, so ye may give them a hardy handshake and a welcome.

Which brings us, lastly, to Jess of Life, or Something Like It. I love this guy's posts. He's kinda like a Collins with some manners. Jess might just become a daily read for me.

So, if you're not already doing it automagically, update your blogrolls! And go say hi to the nu neighbors!

Posted by: Tuning Spork at 01:35 AM | Comments (42) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

May 01, 2005

Awstats

My Awstats are suddenly on the blink. Is anyone else having this problem? Could it have something to do with the PHP-ificatiton that I induced into my templates yesterday? Dunno...

Posted by: Sadie at 11:07 PM | Comments (18) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Swats Aeroplanes Like Flies

mu.nu

is a Collosal Squid that breathes Fire, has four Extra Limbs and X-Ray Vision, swats Aeroplanes like Flies, and lives Underwater.

Strength: 9 Agility: 4 Intelligence: 8


To see if your Giant Battle Monster can
defeat mu.nu, enter your name and choose an attack:

fights mu.nu using

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:54 PM | Comments (10) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Import my old entries

Hey, so I have a backup from mt from... December, and also I found a good little script to export my current Wordpress entries. Now the odd thing is, the backup from MT has carriage returns by the handful, but the new one doesn't.

Does it really matter, will MT still import the entries without CRs?

Oh, also, I will need a hand gettin' them in there once the file has been corrected, I tried once already but it imported someone elses 30 or so entries

Oh, and Hey! I'm new here! Wheee....

Posted by: Oorgo at 04:48 AM | Comments (16) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

April 29, 2005

Favourite Editors

What editor do people use for their MuNu logs? For my old Blogger blog, I was using w.bloggar, though for some reason I can't get it to work with MuNu. What do other people recommend?

And by the way, Angry in the Great White North is officially an active MuNu blog as of today.

Posted by: Steve Janke at 05:30 PM | Comments (20) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

April 28, 2005

Quick And Easy PHPification A.K.A. The Handy Guide

Having your blog generate PHP rather than HTML opens the door to all sorts of cool stuff, particularly if I make a mistake during the regular PHP upgrades and take down your site.

Ahem.

Apart from that PHP allows you to easily have multiple styles, include files from other places (like blogrolls), and as in todays example, compress your pages so they download faster.

Upgrading to PHP isn't hard, and here's how to do it.

Step 1:

Under Weblog Config, in the Preferences page, you will find an entry that says File extension for archive files

If this says html, change it to php. If it says php already, then you don't need to change it at all! Make sure you use lower case.

Click Save.

Got that? Good! You're half way there!
Step 2:

Go to the Templates screen, and select your Main Index template. Check the Output File. If it says index.html, change it to index.php.

Click save.

Yay! You're now running PHP!

I've tried to remember to do this when setting new Munus, but sometimes it gets skipped over. So my apple-logies in that case, but at least it's easy to fix.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:32 PM | Comments (13) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Half A Terabyte Of Bloggy Goodness

We've served up over 500GB of yummy blog and forum goodness so far this month! (Plus another 100GB of anime video clips). That brings us up to and indeed past our previous peak in October/November.

This is great news, but as we continue our plot to take over the world expansion program, we will eventually run out of bandwidth. What a sad day that will be.

How You Can Help

"How can I help?", I hear you cry.

This is how.

First, make sure that your blog is set up to generate PHP files. If not, check out the handy guide at... Where did the handy guide go? Who took the handy guide?

Anyway, assuming you are set up to generate PHP files, put this code at the top of your templates:

<?php ob_start("ob_gzhandler"); ?>
And viola, your web pages will get magically shrunked.* This will make your pages load faster too.

This doesn't reduce things like images, but it can still make quite a dent in bandwidth, with minimal effort and with the benefit of faster response for your readers. So don't delay, <?php ob_start("ob_gzhandler"); ?> today!

* That's the technical term. For the non-technical, your web browser indicates in its request headers whether or not it supports Gzip-compressed pages; all current browsers do. This piece of PHP code checks that setting, and if possible, compresses your web pages before sending them out.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:07 AM | Comments (23) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

April 27, 2005

Minxulations

Some of you might remember, back about 15 months ago, when we were on the old old server, it used to take something like 30 seconds to leave a comment. That was before we moved to the new old server, and before we moved from Berkeley DB (boo hiss!) to MySQL (yay!)

Back then, I started work on a blogging program I called Minx. Minx was written in Python and used a database called Metakit, and it was really really fast, at least until you started getting a lot of posts and comments, whereupon it ate all your memory and died.

So much for Minx 0.1, which bit the dust around January 2004.

Minx 0.2 re-arranged the database a bit, and came along in April 2004. However, by that time we were on the new server and things were relatively speedy again, so there was much less urgency to Minx (and I had a lot of work to do with the migration, and a swarm of new MuNus who joined us around that time). And as it turned out, Minx 0.2 also, once you got past a certain point, ate all your memory and died.

Minx 0.3 came along in December, just before my brain got eaten by hackers and spammers, something that lasted through January and February. March I basically went to bed and played Final Fantasy X and Rumble Roses.* This month I dug out Minx and started playing with it. Minx 0.3 was the best yet, but after a certain point, it ate all your memory and died.

The problem in all three cases was the Metakit database, which is extremely fast and flexible, but has a nasty habit - if you push it too far - of eating all your memory and dying.

And so, a couple of weeks ago, I came up with this startling insight: Minx might work better if I didn't store all the data in Metakit.**

And so Minx 0.4 was born. And it's even faster and better than before, and it still works when you throw - What was it? Right. - when you throw 4000 blogs with a total of 4 million posts (and 20 million comments) at it. At that point, my home machine was starting to struggle a little, but certainly hadn't eaten its memory and died. Minx 0.4 uses Berkeley DB (boo - I mean yay!) only it uses it completely differently to Movable Type, so that it actually works.

Soon - maybe even very soon - the Minx Dev Blog and Ambient Irony will be making the Great Leap Sideways and switching to Minx. You'll know it's happened when trackbacks suddenly stop working. Well, unless they come back five minutes later, in which case it's just Fluffy the anti-spam watchdog at work.

Oh yes, there was a point to all this. Munuvians, if you're interested in the future of your blogging platform™, hop on over to the Minx Dev Blog and take a look around. If that makes your brain hurt, wait for the test release, coming soon to a server near you.

* I'm not a sexist pig, I just play one on TV. Um, literally. At least it's better than Dead or Alive: Extreme Beach Volleyball.
** There's slightly more to it than that. It involved a full understanding of Metakits on-disk and in-memory data structures, and realising that there was no work-around for the problems I was encountering. No matter how I split up the data, as long as I stored it all in Metakit, it would eat up all my memory and die.

[Also posted at Ambient Irony]

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:06 AM | Comments (12) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

April 26, 2005

Jes' Sayin', ya know?

Well, today is my birthday and I'm officially eligible to join AARP, though not necessarily saying I am planning on doing so. Feel free to drop by Read My Lips and leave a comment.

Posted by: Tiger at 05:37 PM | Comments (11) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Finally, A Fix for the Comment Remembering Problem

Fellow munuvians, here is a fix I implemented over at the Jawa. IT WORKS!!

For most mu.nu sites, for some reason, the cookies won't really work. So that your readers must fill in their information every time they want to comment. Gordon at Cranky Neocon took a gander at my site a few months back and fixed it.

Getting the cookies working is VITAL to readership growth. If you want to retain readers then make it easy for them to come back again and again to leave comments. Pretty soon you will have a real community of readers. And they tell their friends, and so on, and so on.

Anyway, here it is

UPDATE: This is as good as I could get it. Just e-mail me if you have problems removing the little smiley faces.

Posted by: Rusty at 05:23 PM | Comments (42) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Winter Songs rises from the ashes

Well, since Leila never found the time/energy/motivation to get Winter Songs going, her big brother, bbrother, is taking the reigns.

He's a friend of mine and I do believe that he will have many interesting and amusing and/or poignant things to say. Please drop by and give him a yay!

Posted by: Tuning Spork at 12:10 AM | Comments (8) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

April 20, 2005

Zorched Again

The nice people at Alexa* have updated the entry for Munu, which used to classify all the mu.nu sites under ambientirony.com, which was kind of wrong.

Unfortunately, in doing so, they zorched our stats. However, the old stats are still there under ambientirony.com, which remains unzorched.

Old:
graph1.png

New:
graph2.png

What this means is that out of every million people on the internet, about 130 are visiting Munu sites on any given day. That doesn't sound like a lot, until you realise that there are something like a billion people on the net.

Comparisons:

Professor Puppy
graph3.png

Slashdot
graph4.png

Kuro5hin
graph5.png

TypePad
graph7.png

Amazon
graph6.png

Verrry interesting.

* An Amazon slave-colony company.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:06 AM | Comments (9) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Fantastico Done Got Blowed Up

Okay, the latest update to the server software was pretty much trouble free - except for Fantastico, which got blowed up real good. The normal fix for that is not fixing this time around. I'm still poking at the smoking remains, and I'll let you know when it's back in one piece.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:19 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

April 19, 2005

Commenting/Trackback Problem

Both my comments and trackbacking aren't working. I thought maybe this was an across the board mu.nu thing, but Ace tells me his are working fine. What gives? Need help quick as I have what I think is an important new post up and dozens of people trying to send TBs to it.

(BTW- new post is an interview, yes REAL JOURNALISM, with the wife of a hostage in Iraq)

UPDATE:

Mental note: when using MT do not accidentally ban ALL IPs. Apparently when I tried to delete a ban earlier today I inadvertantly pressed enter with a blank IP field. Thus, all trackbacks and comments were banned. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Posted by: Rusty at 08:59 PM | Comments (16) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Minxing Once More

I give up.

I've tried Expression Engine. I've tried Wordpress. I've tried Nucleus and Mambo and Drupal and Postnuke. I've installed blogging packages in phpBB. I've looked at Textpattern and Slash and b2Evolution and a dozen other things that I've happily forgotten. I've messed around with Perl and Pike and PHP and Ruby, with MySQL and SQLite and Postregresql and Firebird.

And I hate them all. (Where's that evil smiley when I need it?)

They all work, it's just that none of them work the way I want. No one package supports all the features we need, and the different packages don't inter-operate well enough to be used together. Plus they're ugly and their mothers dress them funny. (Most of them are written in PHP and use SQL databases. It's a hideous combination for all its popularity.)

Meanwhile, I've resolved all the problems that stopped development of Minx this time last year. I've partly solved the issues with the Metakit database, and there is an all new but fully compatible database under active development.

As far as I can see, and I've really looked, no-one has or is developing the software we need to run mu.nu. So I'm back to writing it myself. Minxing once more...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:20 AM | Comments (8) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

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