Blogging Frequency

July 26, 2007 | etbe

You may have noticed that my frequency of posting has increased significantly recently, and that my posts are generally at 7AM and 7PM. I am using the scheduled posting feature of WordPress and writing my posts in advance (currently I have 8 posts in the queue including this one). Generally readers of my blog (particularly those who read Planet syndication pages) don’t want to read 5+ posts in one go. In the past I would write one post at a time and sometimes a couple of days would pass between feeling inspired to write. I had been writing text files and uploading them, but having a text file that’s 95% done is not the same as having a complete post scheduled to be released while I’m doing something else.

This technique works for me, I encourage other people who have things to say but don’t seem to get around to blogging on some days to give it a go.

Incidentally I chose the times 7AM and 7PM because the traffic to my site seems to peak between 7PM and 11PM local time (I haven’t analysed the logs in enough detail to determine whether this is Australians reading blogs after work or people in other countries doing it at work). To release two posts per day it seems most appropriate to space them 12 hours apart (and means that people in the same time zone as me can read a post before going to work).

Column Width in Blogs

July 22, 2007 | etbe

I have just been reading the LinuxWorld Community blog which seems to be mostly Don Marti’s personal blog (currently there seems to be no-one else blogging on that site).

One thing that disappointed me is that the theme designer made it look good at a width of 1000 pixels and no other size. At a smaller width the adverts on the right are cut off (more of a problem for the site owner than for the readers) and at a larger width you have a thin column of text in the middle of the screen. A quick test revealed that while my own blog looks good in wide windows it doesn’t work too well in 800 pixel width and gets very bad at lower widths – my blog would be essentially unusable at 640×480 resolution as the text column in the middle (the most important column) is the one that reduces in size. The LinuxWorld blog has a minimum size of 1000 pixels for the scaling so it allows horizontal scrolling in 640 pixel width and remains quite readable.

The top entry in a google search for web size stats is Browser News which claims that 12% of web browsers are on 800 pixel wide screens. The next link I found claims that as of January 2007 there are 26% of web users with screens that have higher than 1024×768 resolution and 14% with 800×600.

Apart from the first couple of months of blogging my blog has always looked good in screens greater than 1000 pixels wide, but not having it work at 800×600 is a problem. The first thing I did was alter the style.css file for the Blueline theme for WordPress to use 100% of the display width (not 86%). Wasting 14% of the screen width is not a good thing when using a width-intensive three-column theme. This change made my blog work well in 800 pixel width and be bearable in 640 pixel width.

The other change was to use min-width: 700px; in the style.css sections blogtitle, container, and navigation. This means that at 640 pixel width the text column will take more than 1/3 of the screen and should be quite readable (unless the reader has an unusually large font setting). The down-side to this is that if your window width is less than 700 pixels then you will have some horizontal scrolling, but I think that this is an acceptable trade-off.

I was forced to confront this issue when talking to a prospective client about the potential for blogs to be used in his business, he loaded up my blog on an ancient windows machine and it didn’t look very good at all, this coincidentally happened a few hours after I had been reading the LinuxWorld blog on a big screen.

Planet Linux Jobs Victoria

July 10, 2007 | etbe

As part of my ongoing plan to make things easier for Linux job applicants and advertisers I have created a Planet for Linux Jobs in Victoria, Australia.

The LUV President had suggested that I make a proposal to the LUV committee about this. I have offered them ownership of the Victorian aspects of this idea as well as volunteering to run the services for them.

Fragmenting Information about Jobs

July 6, 2007 | etbe

A comment on my previous post about my Linux Jobs Blog suggested that I shouldn’t fragment the information.

However I believe that fragmenting the information is ideal due to the ability of RSS syndication to drive the cost of coalescing the information to almost zero!

Currently there is a Linux job web site run by Linux Australia. It doesn’t have many adverts and isn’t even linked from the main Linux Australia web site. I believe that we can do better for the people who want Linux jobs and the people who have such jobs to advertise.

If you have a central site the jobs have to be moderated (which takes work and delays listing), the larger the area that the site covers the greater the work is to do this.

The solution is to have a distributed system with different people running listings for various regions and a syndication service to aggregate them. To start this I have created a blog which will have categories for the states and territories of Australia. Someone who is only interested in one region can visit the category for that region. Then recruiting agencies and companies which regularly hire Linux people can start their own RSS feeds to be syndicated in a planet instance for each state and territory. This gives a faster and more efficient response (adverts will appear quickly, can be changed or removed at any time, and less effort for moderation. I expect that recruiting agencies will occasionally post off-topic entries – but when their feed gets removed from the Planet installation they will probably make a commitment to do the right thing in future.

Planet installations can syndicate other Planet installations, so we can easily have a Linux jobs Planet for Australia (possibly run by Linux Australia) that syndicates the feeds from each state and territory.

In the long term I think that the best way of running this is to have Linux Australia run the central Planet instance and a LUG in each region run the local site. I started running it myself because I didn’t get a positive response when suggesting it to the relevant people in Linux Australia and LUV. That didn’t deter me, so I decided to set it up myself. If the idea takes off and if Linux Australia and the LUGs want to take it over I’ll be happy to use HTTP redirects to send the traffic to them – and help them with the sys-admin work if asked.

Also there is nothing specific to Australia in this idea. I am only interested in Australia because if I was to attempt to do it in a larger area (such as the EU) then I could spend all my time on it without gaining a critical mass in any region.

If you are interested in running this in your region then you need to set up a blog (for adverts that are sent to you via email) and a Planet installation that feeds from your blog and any other Linux job advert blogs in your region. If your country doesn’t already have a central Planet for jobs then creating a separate Planet installation for your country would be a good idea too. I will be happy to run a Planet installation for world-wide Linux job adverts (at least until I can convince an organization such as Linux International to run it) if this idea takes off in other countries.

Some people have asked what the benefit of a Planet is over a mailing list. You have to subscribe to a mailing list while with a Planet you can immediately visit it if you suddenly decide to find a new job. Subscribing to mailing lists for jobs from all countries would never work, but visiting a Planet for Linux jobs world-wide and then visiting a sub-planet for regional jobs would be quick and easy.

CPU time use from WordPress Javascript

July 4, 2007 | etbe

Currently I have some significant problems with Javascript CPU use when editing my WordPress blog. Some operations take about 10 seconds to complete which involves Konqueror using 100% CPU time. Does anyone have any ideas how to solve this problem? Is there a web browser that pre-compiles Javascript for faster execution?

I am assuming that it’s Javascript at fault, because apart from that there’s nothing complex in the WordPress web pages.

This is an important issue for me as the Konqueror CPU use is the only thing that makes me want to use a faster computer. Apart from that my 3 year old Thinkpad should be able to last at least another couple of years. I recently had my keyboard replaced just before the warrantee ran out and would like to keep using it until I’ve worn out the new keyboard (I have worn out about 6 Thinkpad keyboards, thanks IBM/Lenovo for continually replacing them for me).

Nixforce unauthorised use

June 11, 2007 | etbe

Just over two days ago I sent a DMCA take-down request to nixforce.com for copying my content in violation of the non-commercial license that I offer, I have not had a response from them and they have kept mirroring my site.

I have just sent a DMCA take-down to tierzero.net which appears to be their ISP. The email address listed in the whois record for that ISP bounces as does the postmaster address.

It seems that I’m not the only person with this problem, Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho is also having problems with them. Any suggestions on how to deal with them would be appreciated.

One possibility that I will eventually persue is to file a DMCA request with Google, this can result in their Google Adwords account being terminated.

Easy Search Engine Optimisation in WordPress

June 11, 2007 | etbe

The first thing you need is to have meta keywords in the pages. The solution I discovered for doing this is the All In One SEO Pack, this automatically makes the categories of a blog post become meta keywords, allows adding arbitrary meta keywords when editing the blog post, and supports keywords for the entire blog. It also re-writes the titles to have the title of the post appear before the title of the blog in the <TITLE> tag which is rumored to be a good thing to do.

The next thing you want to do is to create a Google sitemap. A sitemap is an XML file that describes all the URLs in your web site which tells Google (and other search engines) the last change dates of all the URLs and the change frequencies (or how often they should be checked for changes). Note that the format is called Google Sitemaps because Google invented it, other web search engines also use the same format. To generate my sitemap I use the Google Sitemaps Generator which tells earch engines to index my main blog page daily and the category pages weekly (which is configurable). It also has an option to notify Google of changes by pinging the Google service.

Having multiple names for the same web page hurts you when it comes to search engines. Having two separate pages at the top of page 2 is not nearly as good as having one page on page one! To solve this problem I use the Permalink Redirect plugin to make sure that each page has only one URL pointing to it. This plugin also allows redirecting the feed URL to feedburner.com. Feedburner serves the feed data (thus saving you some bandwidth if you are on a slow link) and also tracks statistics on it which are interesting.

Under the Writing section of the Options menu there is an option to enter a list of URLs for update services that can be notified of every post. I use http://rpc.pingomatic.com/ and http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping. The Update Services entry in the WordPress Codex has more information on how this works.

Social networking sites such as digg.com can direct a large amount of traffic to your site if you write about a popular topic. The Share This plugin is the simplest way I found of adding social networking hooks to WordPress (I tried a few others that had both less functionality and less ease of use).

Finally before publishing a post, I often check the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. This often gives me ideas on how to make the meta tags and title match what people are searching for.

putting HTML codes and other special characters into a blog entry

June 10, 2007 | etbe

I often want to write blog posts about HTML code and about source code in various languages. One problem I have is that the characters I want to use have special meanings (EG < and >), another is that I indent source code to make it readable and I don’t want the spaces trimmed from the start of lines.

I initially wrote a simple Perl script to replace characters such as < with HTML codes. I then had to extend it to escaping quote characters because WordPress tries to get smart and change quotes in a way that might look nice when dealing with plain text, but is just a pain when dealing with code.

The next problem I had is that when I used the <PRE> tag around some text to preserve the white-space WordPress would double-space the text (IE insert a blank line between every two lines of code). This was annoying when reading it and in some situations would change the meaning of the code! The solution I have found to these problems is to use the below script and not use the <PRE> tag. Also I tried using the <CODE> tag, but it made no difference to the end result as far as I could see.

The below script is what I am currently using. It is working well with shell scripts, HTML, and XML so far.

Update: The way that -- is munged by WordPress to — is something that I find particularly annoying. I already had this in the script but forgot to mention it in the post.
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New Blogs

May 28, 2007 | etbe

After reading advice from ProBlogger I have become convinced that I should create separate blogs for some of the content that is currently on my blog. The first such blog that I will create will be about computer security. Naturally it will cover SE Linux to some degree, but the exact focus is something I have not yet determined.

Here are the options I’m considering:

The exact topic to be covered, computer security is a broad area, choosing which sub-topics to focus on and which users to present it to is a difficult task.
The length of the articles, this will to some degree depend on the posting frequency. If I am going to post 4+ times per week then most of the posts would be small. But for one or two posts per week I could make them 1000+ word posts.
The mix of news, educational material, and background information. I think that all of these areas are important, and to some extent the mix will depend on what news happens and what technologies I am involved in developing, testing, and using. But I will have a plan as to what to present and on days when there is little news and I have not worked on anything exciting I will find new material to write about based on the plan.
The use of code snippets in a blog? It’s easy to split the post and have the feed not include the source code, would that be of interest or would you rather have the complete post in the feed for offline reading?

Also if you have any other suggestions for blogs that you would read if I was to write them then plese send them in via a blog comment or email.

Planet feed polling frequency

May 16, 2007 | etbe

From reading my web stats yesterday it seems that one Planet has polled by blog feed 1693 times over the first 14.25 days of this month. This is about 5 polls per hour. Another Planet has polled my blog 994 times for an average of about 3 hits per hour.

How frequently does it make sense to poll blogs? Speaking for myself I think that waiting an extra 10 minutes to see my latest blog post isn’t going to hurt anyone, and encouraging Planet readers to reload the page so frequently probably isn’t doing them a favour either.

For my own personal Planet installation (which mainly aggregates other Linux Planets for my own personal use) I have it poll the feeds every four hours. For a Planet installation designed for general readership it would make sense to have it poll more frequently. Maybe once every hour or once every half-hour.

When I initially set up my own planet installation I aggregated the entire feed list of Planet Debian and Planet Linux Australia and it generally took between 10 and 30 minutes to poll all the feeds with 20 minutes being common (Planet does not support parallel downloads). So for a moderate sized Planet with frequent polling you might have one poll end after the next cron job for a poll has begun.

It’s a pity that Planet doesn’t support pings. Will the next version do so? I would rather have my blog ping the Planets that I know of that aggregate my content and save thousands of needless polls while also giving a faster update.

Finally if you need a fast response for a dialogue then probably blogs and Planets are not the communication mechanism to use, a mailing list would probably be more appropriate.

etbe – Russell Coker

Linux, politics, and other interesting things

Category Archives: Blogging