Toby's Blog

Changes to this blog

You may start to notice some changes to the way this blog is displayed to you. For starters, I have moved it over to a new format where the text is no longer hard-coded into the page. Instead, it's stored in a database, making the page easier to update and modify, since it can all be done from a web browser.

This new system means that it will soon be possible for me to add RSS, permalinks, excerpts on the homepage etc. I am also working on enabling Track-Back and comments to the blog posts.

Don't worry, however, about having to change any hyperlinks you already have saved. All original URLs used (i.e. http://www.1site1moment.com/toby/blog.asp) will not change but I will probably add in a few more to accommodate the new features. Watch this space!

Server logging

Looking at my server logs, I have noticed that quite a significant number of people visit just one page of this website, then disappear. Unfortunately, this means that I am unable to find out whether they actually read that page or just immediately hit back because there's no data on how long they spent looking at the page; I only see the initial page load.

However, now, I have introduced an AJAX-style way to find out how long people spend looking at my pages. What it does, is it sends out a request after 5 seconds, then 10, then 20, then 40 etc to the server where it's logged and I can read it. To avoid flooding the logs, I have made it so that the time interval between each request doubles each time and, just in case someone opens the page then leaves it for a couple of hours, I have made script stop after about 5 minutes.

If you want to see the code, hit View > Source; it's near the top of the file. I'm not really very familiar with JavaScript so please tell me if you spot any bugs I made.

1site1moment page editor

Many years ago, before this website even existed, 1site1moment.com offered the ability to create one page on the internet quickly and for free, hence the name 1site1moment. Unfortunately, it lacked the ability to create more than one page, or for you to edit your pages afterwards. No-one really used it and at one point it completely vanished off the website (I can't remember why). You can see roughly what it used to look like at the Internet Archive.

However, now, I have made a new version where you log in and make any number of pages within the http://www.1site1moment.com/s/username/ folder. It features WYSIWYG editor for applying formatting to the page.

Internet Explorer 7

Note: This post is about beta software. The final version may change.

Over the last few months, I've been seeing more and more information and screenshots of Internet Explorer 7. They certainly looked impressive (even if they were nowhere close to the ones on the new Windows Vista and Office) but I suspect that I might be making that judgement purely on the basis of the toolbars being shuffled around. To be honest, it's the first thing you notice when you see these screenshots. They're right at the top and there's nearly always a new set of buttons, or some dazzling new 3D effect.

Today, I decided to give IE7 a try. However, before I hit download, I decided to check a few details just to make sure it was a good idea.

Firstly, most importantly, I checked to see if it was possible to uninstall the program, if I didn't like it. I'm not a big fan of permanent, irreversible changes and I was a bit doubtful especially considering the fact that IE is so heavily integrated into Windows. Fortunately, there was an uninstall method involving Add/Remove Programs documented on MSDN. Even if that didn't work, there's always System Restore.
Secondly, I checked to see if there were any bugs that could cause IE7 to crash. There were some bugs but they only really happened in obscure situations that I'm unlikely to encounter. However, it is a beta product so there probably are some other, undiscovered bugs out there. Only time and extensive testing will tell me for sure.
Finally, I looked to see what features had been removed. As before, this seemed OK since most of the features (such as GOPHER) were only used in obscure situations.

The initial download was reasonably fast (about 1% downloaded per second) but the installation routine could be better. The blue image as the background looked quite professional, like the backgrounds of other Microsoft installation wizards but unfortunately it made the buttons and other components on the form have a strange border on them. I suspect this might be because the buttons had been designed to work best on a plain grey background but I don't know for sure. Another problem was that when the actual installation took place, there was no real progress bar, just a few green rectangles flying across the screen. Since the installation took quite a long time, this was a bit annoying since I didn't know how far through the process it was.

After restarting the computer, I saw a new icon on the desktop showing IE7's new logo - an 'e' with a gold band round it. Clicking on this took me to Internet Explorer 7. I expected to arrive at Google, my home page but I was surprised to see the address bar flashing between URLs starting with go.msn.com and similar. I hoped that my homepage had not been reset to the default setting. Luckily, I was only seeing options to configure the browser, so this was OK.

I started exploring through a number of different options available but I particularly liked the zoom feature. When I had IE on full screen mode, I noticed that, apart from the web page itself, only the status bar was displayed. This drew my eye to the zoom feature and I soon found myself zooming in and out of web pages and even ending up with a giant version of Google staring at me. The zoom out feature also worked quite well for taking screenshots of web pages. Changing the zoom level in IE7 was quite similar to changing the text size in IE. However, the problem with changing text size is that it often messes up the layout of web pages and many pages don't support it at all. Zooming, however, zoomed in on images and all of the other elements of the web page so that the page still maintained its layout. Unfortunately, the main side effect is that you are required to use the horizontal scroll bar when zoomed in because the zoomed in width is always wider than normal, to keep the page layout the same.

One major problem with IE7 is that the laptop touch pad no longer has the ability to navigate back and foreword. Apart from that, it seems pretty good.

RSS Feeds

You may begin to start noticing a few orange icons around the site. These allow you to syndicate any frequently updating information such as New Features and the news on the home page. Why am I doing this? After seeing IE7's great support for RSS feeds, I couldn't resist having that little orange icon on the toolbar light up.

Iran in Maps

The BBC have released a map of Iran that allows you to add and remove your own layers. I think this is quite a good idea because it allows you to customize the map yourself and look at the information in more detail. It would be good if all internet maps were like this. Unfortunately, most maps with this kind of feature require you to ether download a program (such as Google Earth) or pay money.

Site Search

Some of you may have noticed a few changes in the site search function on the home page.

Firstly, I've got rid of the option to search the whole internet (as opposed to just my site) with Google. Basically, I'm not Google, so there's no point in people to come all the way to my site when they could just as easily go to http://www.google.com

Secondly, I've got rid of Google.

Why? Well, I can't let people search my site through them if they do not appear to have indexed any of my pages. All that comes up is a message telling me that my search did not match any documents, which is completely useless. In fact, it's as bad as a broken link.

On the other hand, MSN search has indexed a lot of my pages and even has me ranked quite highly for a few search terms such as ansii series and spirograph spreadsheet. They also allow me to customize what is searched more by allowing me to tell them not just to search my site, but also the forum, and I can even tell them to give more preference to pages from my site.

Unfortunately, there are a few side effects to this update. Firstly, MSN do not provide the capability to change colours and logos etc on the search results page. However, the colours that I did chosen for the Google search results page did not really look very good and to be honest, the results would have looked much better with the default settings. So perhaps it is better not to be able to change much in the way of colours.

Another problem is that once you have made the search, your search terms appear in the box at the top of the search results page, along with with all of the extra information that I included that told MSN where to look for the pages. If you were to use this box yourself to refine your search, you may find it a bit confusing, or, worse still, you may accidentally remove the details about my site site and end up searching the entire internet, instead of just my site.

Google

You may wonder why I even had the Google search box there in the first place, if they did not index my site. Basically, what happened was that when I was first building my site, I had quite a bit of content contained in the downloads section but the homepage was blank apart from the standard header seen all over the website and a 'welcome to my site' message. This didn't exactly make a good first impression.

I therefore added most of what you can see today, such as 'New Features' and 'Latest News' from the BBC's RSS feed. Additionally, I added a Google search box. It did not include the site-search option at that time since Google had not yet discovered my website.

Over time, Google managed to index a few of my pages, starting with the ones linked to from the home page, and working through to a few of the other pages. At this point, I added the option to search my website. It worked quite well.

However, after a while, a strange thing happened. Several of my pages began to drop off their index until there were only about three of my pages listed. Then, these dropped off, until only the homepage was indexed. At this point, I complained to Google, using the 'Dissatisfied? Help us improve' link at the bottom of their page. Unfortunately, the trend continued and even my homepage dropped off their search results.

I assumed that it was just a temporary problem. After all, they are constantly changing their algorithms and small sites like this one are constantly being shuffled around the search results. However, the problem did not go away.

Looking at the server logs for my website, I noticed frequent visits from MSNBot and a number of visitors who were referred to my site by MSN Search. After looking at MSN Search myself, I noticed that my site was indeed indexed quite well by them. I found out how to add a search box to my site and I configured it to search my site and the forum, but giving preference to my site. I also removed the white background, put it in the centre of the page and made it longer, so that hopefully, people will use it to help them find the things on my site.

Pages I've Edited becomes redundant

I originally posted this onto my user page on Wikipedia

I'm afraid I will be no longer updating the Pages I've Edited section. I decided that it was simply too tedious to have to update it every time I update a page. Instead, I'm afraid you'll just have to make do with my User Contributions list.

However, for those of you looking for an alternative way to view my edits, don't despair. I have introduced a ' My Comments' section that finds every page that I have commented on (by the way, my definition of 'comment' is anything that includes my signature on).

This is how it works:

I sign a page like this: Tra (Talk)
The underlying code looks like this: [[User:Tra|Tra]] [[User:Tra/MyComments|(Talk)]]
As you can see, the ''(talk)'' section of my signature links to User:Tra/MyComments.
That page redirects to my talk page.
Looking at the What Links Here list for the User:Tra/MyComments page will give you a list of every page with my signature on it, i.e. every page I've ever signed.

The Skin Fiasco

I originally posted this onto my user page on Wikipedia

I happened to be exploring the Wikimedia website when I came across this page which had some pretty good information on how to customize themes. I went ahead and downloaded the monobook.css file before proceeding to tinker with the background and border colours, making everything orange. I copied this new style sheet into my '/mytheme.css' page. I then went to preferences and set my theme to 'mytheme'.

Didn't Work.

All I got was this terrible theme which looked nothing like anything that I'd seen on Wikipedia before. Therefore, I put the style sheet instead into the '/monobook.css' page. I then set my theme to monobook.

My orange theme worked quite well.

Well, almost...

The problem was that whenever I viewed a user page (the normal subject pages worked fine), the tabs, user settings, Wikipedia logo and the tools down the left hand side had disappeared completely.

I wasn't happy about this.

So, I changed my preferences to the classic skin and, using this skin, managed to erase the contents of the '/monobook.css' page. I changed the preferences back to monobook and, to my horror, I still had my bright orange, dosn't-work-on-userpages skin.

So, then I tried going to the '/monobook.css' page and I pasted in text copied from here. It was at that point that I noticed some text saying that if you click preview, you can get a preview of what the style sheet looked like. So I clicked preview and I was presented with the normal monobook theme except that the text and some of the lines were all wrong. So, I tried removing the entire style sheet altogether and, when clicking preview, I was presented with the normal, grey monobook skin, completely working.

Phew.

So, I clicked save.

Big Mistake.

I was presented, yet again with my bright, florescent orange, never-goes-away, annoying skin. I was back where I started. What could I do? Was it a bug in Wikipedia? Had my browser stopped working? No. It was just me (yet again) forgetting to read the small print. Apparently, I had to press Ctrl + F5.

Well, I thought to myself, let's press it and see.

Now, you're all going to be wandering whether it worked or not. If it hadn't then I would have probably ended up using the classic skin forevermore. If it had worked then I would have been overjoyed; everything would have been back to normal.

The truth was that it did work.

(everyone sighs with relief) Now, you're all probably mutter to yourselves 'newbie'. Well, if you do, I'm going to leave you with one final thought - The nice, plain, grey monobook shin is far better than any other skin I've seen.