mu.nu - We're sorry we accidentally destroyed your panties.

April 09, 2004

Blacklist


Although MT Blacklist is designed to block spam, if you feed it a word, say "none", for example, it will block any comments or pings containing that word. And the rules are applied equally across all of Munuvia.

Not saying this is wrong, mind you, just saying is all.

Though given the number of hits and the short period of time, it looks like either spam or a crapflood... Except that it's from all different IP addresses. So I dunno.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:58 PM | Comments (66) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Hello

I just wanted to scurry by here for a moment and thank Pixy Misa for giving me a nice warm munu hole in which to hide. I do hope to be able to meet all of you soon, especially if you have any good cheese.

Mr Mouse - now squeaking from beyond the black hole.

Posted by: Mr Mouse at 04:16 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Counters and such

So did we ever get a counter script for use on munu blogs or are we still having to use SiteMeter or some other counters?

Posted by: notGeorge at 04:15 AM | Comments (17) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

April 08, 2004

I Thought That's What It Was

A bit of tinkering and now I know what the problem is with subdomains.

You see, here at MuNu we not only host a whole bunch of MuNu domains, and MuNu subdomains, and the DNS server for those domains and subdomains, but also the MuNu domain itself, and the DNS for that.

So I can't get away with just setting up everyone's DNS entries; I also need to set up the main MuNu registry.

On the old box which didn't have CPanel I got around this with a single, centralised zone file and a bit of trickery, but CPanel doesn't allow me to make such shortcuts. I'm fixing it now, and by tomorrow everyone will be able to create subdomains to their hearts' delights. Speaking of which, I have Turkish Delight easter eggs. Mmmmmmm....

A quick bit of scriptery saved me from having to manually enter nameserver details for 122 domains. Did you realise that we have 122 domains hosted here? Me neither. Where did they all come from?

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:43 PM | Comments (10) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Happy! Happy! Happy!

It's Bill Whittle's Birthday. Go and wish him many more and check out the realy cool present he bought for himself.

Posted by: Stephen Macklin at 10:48 AM | Comments (9) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Rebuild Problem Fixed

Turn off Norton Internet Security! (Or even better, trash it).

I hated to show up in this community sounding like a whiner, but I couldn't get my template or any new posts to rebuild when posting from home. Naturally, I was getting pretty frustrated.

I finally figured out that my software firewall (Norton Internet Security) seems to be interfering with the rebuild process. Turned it off. Voila! Rebuilding is now speedy!

Yay!

Now I can finally start tweaking the template and getting some new material up.

Posted by: JohnL at 04:51 AM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Stoopid Is as Stoopid Does

Thanks to the advice and counsel of Pixie and Jennifer who were both far too polite and kind to name where the stoopidity lies, I copied the SiteMeter scripty thingy into all of the archive template thingies. Now I can see when people visit my site but not necessarily the main page. Can you guess when I made this change?

spike.jpg

Posted by: Stephen Macklin at 03:01 AM | Comments (9) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

April 07, 2004

CSS Style Sheets 'R' not Us Me

How do I make a three Column site? Its for FYF. I would Ideally like to have one side where the various authors can have short bio's and links, and the other side be all the MuNu links and the calender and stuffs. But I can't figure out how to make a third column.

Posted by: Mookie at 06:13 PM | Comments (19) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Ellis Island

Hi all.

Things have been a bit busier this week than expected, what with yet more disk drives playing up (at work and at home) and trying to get things finished before I take some time off. New blog creation will resume tomorrow.

Meanwhile, I have created a blog dedicated to nominating, educating, and initiating welcoming new Munuvians. It's called Ellis Island.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:59 AM | Comments (30) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

April Flowers

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your bloggled masses yearning for MT,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, blogspot-tossed, to me:
I lift my lamp beside the MuNu door.

April 14* is the first anniversary of the MuNu blogging phenomenon, and we're having a party!

And any party needs guests. So: Bring 'em on! We all know good blogs languishing on Blogspot, or Livejournal, or Blog City, or that "Radio" thingy. We all know that they really want to be here on MuNu, but are too shy to ask.

So, nominate your favourites here. There's no shortage of space here on MuNu - another hundred blogs would be no problem at all.

What sort of blogger are we looking for?

We're looking for bloggers just like us, since the Munuvians are such a coherent group.

Uh...

To join the party, you must meet the following conditions:

  • Species: You need to be human, or be at least able to converse in English. (Dual-language blogs are welcome, but although I speak 25 computer languages, Ich spreche nur ein bisschen Deutsch and less French and Japanese, so a facility with English is pretty much essential. Rabbits, cats, dogs, fish and so on are welcome as long as they speak a language I understand.)

  • Sense of Humour: Required. That doesn't mean you have to write a funny blog, just that you know the difference between taking matters seriously and taking yourself seriously.

  • Politics: Optional. As long as you can distinguish between fact and opinion and paranoid raving, we really don't care where - if anywhere - you lie in Zebriski's Seven-Dimension Polispace™

  • Technical Skills: Welcome - but not necessary. Every Munuvian is a geek-in-training, and we always welcome more geeks or geeks-to-be.

  • Subject Matter: Yes.
    • Current Munuvians - and non-Munuvians too - nominate your favourites here!

    What you get as a Munuvian:

  • A Movable Type blog, installed, tested and ready to go

  • Free hosting

  • Free email

  • Free web forum

  • Free prestige mu.nu domain name**

  • Access to the Munuviana group blog

  • 24-hour*** tech support by blog or email

  • The company of the bestest band of bloggers around!
    • But wait, there's more! During the month of April, we will be giving out prizes:
    Munuvian Underground 2004 World Domination Tour Tee Shirts will be awarded to the Munuvian with -

  • Best new blog

  • Best old blog

  • Best blog written by Susie

  • Best blog written by someone under 18

  • Nomination for best new blog

  • Nomination for the most new Munuvians

  • Prettiest blog

  • Funniest blog

  • Neatest correct entry
    • And more!****

    * Or Possibly June 8. Or June 10.
    ** Offer not available anywhere else.
    *** Almost.
    **** As soon as I think of something.

    Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:03 AM | Comments (322) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

    Stoopid SiteMeter Question

    I have a SiteMeter question and I am willing to accept stoopid as the basic answer even if it is me.

    I have gotten a number of recorded visits for which one of my own posts is the referring URL how is this possible?

    And another thing, I have gotten comments to the same post without a visitor registering at all. I get pathetically little traffic so I can tell. I tend to attribute this to SiteMeter not working but since it's the same post I can't help but wonder what the F*%# is going on.

    UPDATE:This is an old post in Hold the Mayo terms. It is post #6, and in terms of comment volume the 2nd most popular one on the site!

    Posted by: Stephen Macklin at 01:22 AM | Comments (11) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

    April 05, 2004

    Wee Wee

    Okay, folks, here's how it works.

    MT is robust and has lots of good features, but it's as slow as a dead dog. For example, on an Athlon XP 2800+, with both the code and the database stored in a ram disk, it takes around 28 seconds of CPU time to add a three-word post to Ambient Irony. I haven't yet had time to profile MT to work out what the hell it's doing with all that time. Part of the problem is MT's insistence on static files and its brute-force approach: Whenever you update a post or add a comment, MT will rebuild not only the individual entry, but also the main index, the archive for whatever categories that post is in, and the archives for that day, week and month, and the archives for the previous day, week and month, and, if they exist, the archives for the following day, week and month.

    And MT is slow at just rebuilding a single entry, so when it has to run around rebuilding everything in sight, it's really slow.

    Without fixing the code, the only way I can see to cure this is to give it less work to do. One way to do this is to disable any archives you don't use. If you don't use categories, make sure that category archives are turned off.

    The next thing you can do is to make the templates simpler. And here's where my little trick comes in.

    If you have your blog set up like me, the appearance of the posts in the main index is exactly the same as in the monthly archives and the category archives. You could use a sub-template to keep the common data, but there's an even sneakier thing you can do:

    Step 1.

    Create a new template. Call it something like "Individual Include Template". Copy the section of your main template that deals with the individual entries into this new template. If you are using the default MT template, the result will be this:


    <div class="blogbody">

    <a name="<$MTEntryID pad="1"$>"></a>
    <h3 class="title"><$MTEntryTitle$></h3>

    <$MTEntryBody$>

    <MTEntryIfExtended>
    <span class="extended"><a href="<$MTEntryPermalink$>#more">Continue reading "<$MTEntryTitle$>"</a></span><br />
    </MTEntryIfExtended>

    <div class="posted">Posted by <$MTEntryAuthor$> at <a href="<$MTEntryPermalink$>"><$MTEntryDate format="%X"$></a>
    <MTEntryIfAllowComments>
    | <a href="<$MTCGIPath$><$MTCommentScript$>?entry_id=<$MTEntryID$>" onclick="OpenComments(this.href); return false">Comments (<$MTEntryCommentCount$>)</a>
    </MTEntryIfAllowComments>
    <MTEntryIfAllowPings>
    | <a href="<$MTCGIPath$><$MTTrackbackScript$>?__mode=view&entry_id=<$MTEntryID$>" onclick="OpenTrackback(this.href); return false">TrackBack (<$MTEntryTrackbackCount$>)</a>
    </MTEntryIfAllowPings>
    </div>

    </div>
    Save the new template.
    Step 2.

    Now go into the Archiving page in Weblog Config. Click on the Add New button at the bottom, and create a new Individual Entry archive using the template you just created.

    You will need to give the files created by this template a new and unique name. This is what the Archive File Template field is for. You will need to use MT tags here to generate the name. A good, simple name might be 

    <$MTEntryID>.i

    Now, save your archive settings and do a full rebuild of your blog to generate all those little .i files, because in the next step you're going to need them.

    Step 3.

    Go into your Main Index template and (after making a backup copy), cut out all the code you put into your new "Individual Include Template" and replace it with this:

    <?php  include 'archives/<$MTEntryID>.i'; ?>

    (Assuming that your archive directory is called "archives", which it probably is.)

    Save your changes, but don't rebuild yet. Go into the Preferences page in Weblog Config, and scroll down to where it says File extension for archive files This is probably set to html. You will need to change it to php.

    And in the Templates page, select your Main Index template and change the output file to index.php.

    Save the changes, and now go and rebuild your main index. If you got it right, it will now rebuild without having to process the details of the individual entries. The entries will instead be read automatically from their individual .i files whenever someone visits your blog.

    Repeat step 3 for your daily, weekly, monthly and category archives, whichever ones you may be using, except that for these you will not need to specify the "archives" directory as it will look there automatically.

    Step 4. (Optional)

    Somewhere near the top of your main index, add the following code:

    <?php

    $timeparts = explode(' ',microtime());
    $starttime = $timeparts[1].substr($timeparts[0],1); ?>

    And in a suitable place near the end, add this:
    <div class="sidetitle">
    Render Time
    </div>

    <div class="side">
    <?php
    $timeparts = explode(' ',microtime());
    $endtime = $timeparts[1].substr($timeparts[0],1);
    echo bcsub($endtime,$starttime,6)?> seconds<br>
    </div>

    This will show you how long PHP takes to put all the individual entries together to build your page. A fairly typical result for Ambient Irony, which has 25 entries on the main page, is 0.005888 seconds. Which I must say is satisfyingly quick.

    Having done all of that, is MT now zoomily fast? Alas, no. It will probably halve the time required to add a post or leave a comment, but it's still dog slow compared to what it should be capable of.

    ExpressionEngine is quite a bit faster at processing posts and comments - at least ten times faster - but it's between thirty and a hundred times slower at delivering the pages. That's the main reason I decided not to go down that route.

    This is basically how Minx works, except that the Minx template engine is about a hundred times faster than Movable Type's. It's just a pity that it's not finished yet.

    Update!

    I have now disabled the rebuilding of archive and index pages when someone leaves a comment on Ambient Irony. This has reduced the comment processing time down to around 4 seconds. Still slow, but much less slow.

    Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:58 AM | Comments (50) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

    Linking Power

    Now that Munu is gathering strength it's time to unite and do some good in the world. There is a push to replace the current anti-semitic top link in the Google search for Jew and replace it with the Wikipedia link to Jew instead (aka Google bombing). Please chip link in and pass it on.

    Posted by: Simon at 10:23 AM | Comments (10) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

    Help?

    I'm trying to post at my new blog, but the process seems to freeze in the middle of rebuilding. I've waited several minutes (and I have a high bandwidth connection) but no luck.

    I'm trying a post here to see if it's just my blog, or whether it freezes here, too.

    Posted by: JohnL at 05:48 AM | Comments (17) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

    Whee

    Hi all.

    I think I may have figured out a way to dramatically speed up Movable Type. It requires either having the Apache web server (which we do) or PHP (which we also do), but apart from that, it works entirely within MT and doesn't require any external programs. No periodic rebuilds or anything.

    Anyway, I'm going to try it tonight on Ambient Irony, and if it works I'll post all the details here. (Actually, I know already that it will work, I just don't know how much faster it will be. We shall see. )

    Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:31 AM | Comments (12) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

    April 04, 2004

    Another Voice

    Hello fellow Munuvians... (that still looks nice when I type it)
    So before the new blog smell has even worn off in my little corner of Munu, I'm adding another author... When he'll get around to posting, I don't know, but if you manage to catch a post over at Backstage, from Bob, make him feel welcome as only the Munuvians can...

    Posted by: Backstage at 03:47 PM | Comments (11) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

    Help Tracking IP address?

    Since I lost my pc I lost my sites that helped me track IP addresses. I need to find out where this one comes from:

    66.12.105.132

    Can anyone help?

    //Helen

    Posted by: Everydaystranger at 12:03 PM | Comments (18) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

    Now On To Stage, Um, Three?

    The next stage in our tireless quest for World Domination* here at MuNu is - and this is a really brilliant and sneaky idea:

    A Mu.Nu website!
    Yes, you can go to http://mu.nu/ now but it's really not worth your time.

    Trust me. Oh, you clicked on it? I was right, wasn't I?

    Anyway, as well as upgrading the forums and welcoming new blogs and doing a little houskeeping over at Ambient Irony and (where's my list?) oh yes, setting up the MuNu General Store, I will be creating a central MuNu portal site, probably using MX System.

    Each day on this portal I'd like to post some of the best of your blog entries. Actually, what I'll probably be doing is posting short excepts with a link back to your blog for people to read the whole article. Once things are up and running, I'll have a link available for you to submit things that you'd like to appear there. Think of it as a sort of everyday Carnival** of the Vanities.

    No one is obliged to submit anything, of course. But if you've written something that you think is good, this will be the place to get it some wider attention.

    Munuviana will continue as our meeting place; the new site is intended as our collective public site.

    One other thing: Once it's up and running and (hopefully) has a few readers, I'll be running ads. Probably Blogads. Only there, and nowhere else; though you are all free to run ads on your individual blogs if you like. (Just try not to turn into The Netflix Marketing Board.) If a reasonable percentage of the overall readers of MuNu come to the main site, those ads will not only cover the cost of the server but free t-shirts for all the Munuvians too! And since the revenue will scale with readership, we'll be able to move to a bigger faster server if it should become necessary. (Right now, we're doing fine, except that MT is always a bit slow. We're now using twice as much bandwidth as at the start of the year, but we still have room to grow fivefold before it starts to become a worry.)

    I'll post more details here as things progress. I expect to have it up and running within the next two weeks... Since I have most of the next two weeks off.

    * Black leather outfits optional.
    ** Not Bonfire.

    Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:29 AM | Comments (15) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

    April 03, 2004

    Hello...

    Hi everybody. Pixy just set up my site, and I'll be joining you now.

    I hope that There's One Only! will be able to maintain the low standards it has been setting for weeks.

    Posted by: GEBIV at 03:30 PM | Comments (20) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

    Humble Servant

    I hearby proclaim myself prostrate at the feet of MadfishWillie. Since I cannot thank him enough, I have decided to go public. Thank you for fixing my blog. You are my knight in shining armor. And I am really hoping that this medicine has not made me so loopy that I accidentally type 'prostate'. I am forever indebted.

    Posted by: Alex at 09:36 AM | Comments (13) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

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