MT.Net

There are 145 posts filed in MT.Net (this is page 8 of 15).

Highlights of 2010: Social media

This year I will once again celebrate my blog highlights, but also will give a nod to the other social media sites.

On the blog front, MT.Net collected 1.73 million hits over this year, translating to 260,000 unique visits. That’s an average of 711 visits per day and about 30% traffic growth from the year before. It’s been a good year, traffic-wise. On the posting side, I estimate I’ve written about 450 new posts this year.

I’m always amused at what brings people to my site, too. I’m still one of the top search results for the Sugarhill Gang’s epic rap song, Rapper’s Delight. I’m also still collecting plenty of web hits for Jefferson’s Bank Quote. I also draw web searchers looking for Bradley Manning, 1Gb Internet, 99% of people can’t watch this video more than 25 seconds, free iPad scam, and TSA cavity search.
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Weather online again

MT.Net weather station file photo

Well, it took me about a year after I set up my weather station in our current house before I actually connected it to the outside world but last night I got around to it. Seeing Travis’s taped-up toy weather station sitting sadly in yesterday’s rain got me motivated to give the kids some weather graphs and statistics to check whenever they want.

Now anyone can check the weather in East Raleigh by clicking on this link. Weather information updates every 10 minutes “on the elevens.” I still have to repair my wind speed gauge but everything else is working. Eventually I hope to upgrade to wireless (and solar) instruments I can mount above the roof but this will work for now.

Power outage

We had a power outage this evening from 8:30 to 10:00 PM. Afterward our home fileserver did not boot, so personal email accounts and home phone are temporarily down. Hopefully I can get things straightened out Monday. The server issue is with the motherboard and/or (more likely) the power supply. The drives should be fine so I don’t expect any data loss.

The power failure took the opportunity to interrupt my breadmaking. I had kicked off a new flavor, Italian wheat, only to have the power pull the plug on it after 90 minutes. It was a short blip but enough to knock the breadmaker out of its cycle. Fortunately, I found another cycle that heads to the bake cycle relatively quickly and got it going again. Then the power failed again, this time for the 90 minute outage. I still would not give up on my bread, though, and resumed baking it after the power returned. Against all odds it turned out great!
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Raleigh’s media sites can’t search, either

Before our area media start feeling high and mighty, I was amused to find it nearly impossible to track down today’s story on Russ’s comments about the city’s website on the News and Observer website. After searching in vain using the N&O’s own search engine, it took me some thoughtful Google searches to turn it up.

With each iteration of its website, the paper’s search engine has become less useful. What’s even worse, with each redesign all the web links to online stories have changed completely, breaking not only any links any outside sites made to stories but also any links indexed by search engines. Thus if you couldn’t find what you’re looking for after the N&O redesign, God help you because Google certainly won’t. I’m no web professional, but even I know to create forwards from old links to new ones whenever humble MT.Net makes changes. That’s Webmastering 101.
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Fixing GNU Mailman to handle mimetypes

I host a few neighborhood email lists on my Linux server running the excellent GNU Mailman list server software. Part of my setup involves stripping pictures/documents from emails and storing them in the list archives instead. This way 300 neighbors don’t get a 5 MB attachment emailed out to them: if anyone wants to view the picture/document all they have to do is click on a link in the original email and it will be fetched from the archives.

Tonight I noticed that the MIME type image/pjpeg wasn’t being properly parsed by Mailman’s Scrubber.py script. Having dealt with MIME type problems before, I suspected that the problem wasn’t with Mailman itself but the operating system’s definition of the MIME type.

Sure enough, checking the /etc/mime.types file revealed there was no image/pjpeg type defined. A little more Internet hunting brought me to this post on the Mailman list, confirming the missing mime.type info as the culprit:

On Jan 6, 2010, at 8:18 AM, Ralf Hildebrandt wrote:

> * Ralf Hildebrandt :
>> I have a list where the attachments are removed and stored on the
>> mailman server itself.
>>
>> This works like a charm, but SOME image attachments of the type:
>>
>> image/pjpeg
>>
>> are stored as “attachment.bin” instead of “attachment.jpg”
>>
>> Why?
>> Example below:
>
> adding “image/pjpeg” to /etc/mime.types fixed that:
>
> image/jpeg jpeg jpg jpe
> image/pjpeg jpeg jpg jpe

This is because Mailman uses Python’s mimetypes module to generate the file
name, and I believe that consults /etc/mime.types where available. Since
before you edit Python didn’t know anythig about image/pjpeg, it assumed it was
random binary data, hence the .bin suffix.

-Barry

From what I can find out, image/pjpeg is a type that Microsoft products choose to use instead of the image/jpeg that the rest of the world uses. I guess those crazy Redmonders are just trying to keep us on our toes, eh?

Posting boasting

I have to give a shout out to my blogging friend Chris O’Donnell on his 5,000th post. That’s a lot of blogging, and quite an accomplishment.

Personally, this marks my 4,553rd published post. I expect to break 5,000 within a year, though I have to say my increasing use of Twitter or Facebook has slowed my pace a bit. A quick update to those microblogs is like a quick scratch of an itch, whereas a blog post is like a full-blown bath in calamine lotion!

WordPress has Facebook-like link excerpting

Remember when I wished I had Facebook-like link excerpting in WordPress? It turns out I already do: it’s a bookmarklet built into WordPress called Press This.

Here’s how to use it:

In your WordPress Dashboard’s menu, click Tools. Drag the Press This link at the bottom of that page to your browser’s toolbar.

Now, when viewing a webpage that you’d like to add to your blog, simply highlight whatever text you’d like to include in your blog post and click on the Press This bookmarklet you just created. A new window will open up with your selected text already added to the editor and the title of the post set to the title of the webpage you were viewing. You can then adjust the text accordingly (add comments, etc.), and then click Publish. Super easy!

A big hat-tip to Scott Reston for pointing out this nifty feature!

Google background images irritate some

Google opted today to splash some color on its trusty, rusty search page using background images. Some aren’t so hip to the change, said by some to be a response to Microsoft’s BING search engine.

I’d be okay with the change as long as it didn’t slow down the loading of my Google page and I had the option to turn it off. While this could have been a welcome change, Google screwed up when it didn’t give users the ability to disable it.

Attention, Google: I use your search engine for the results it provides me, not because it’s pretty (or not pretty, as the case may be). Give your users the option to turn off the BING bling and everything will be cool.

Update 3 PM: Google listened, and now users can get the old-fashioned page back again. Thanks, Goog!

Adding Facebook’s link excerpt functionality to WordPress

One of the things that makes me more prone to update Facebook rather than my blog is the ease that Facebook’s user interface provides for quickly adding a link and a comment to that link. I click on the “link” box and my browser automatically loads an excerpt from the link’s page, including thumbnails from that page. I can add my commentary on the link in a few seconds and publish it to my Facebook wall.

Does anyone know if there is a WordPress plugin that implements link excerpting the way Facebook does? I often see interesting webpages and simply want to quickly share them without hassling with a WordPress editor to do so.

I’ve found plenty of plugins that implement some Facebook-ish functionality but nothing that does this exact thing. Evermore comes closest, but it excerpts one’s own blog posts, rather than something to which one is linking.

Let me know if anyone finds anything.

Update 21 June 2010: WordPress has this built in and I just now found it out. Hurray!