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Wednesday, 27 June 2012
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Blogaversary
posted at
09:26 AM
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A few stats:
Entries: 2,268
Words: 701,668 (not counting code)
Comments: 2418
Hits: 1,426,013
Something that's kind of amusing (well, to me) is a page that shows the times of day when I've posted, by hour. It seems, for example, that my most productive blogging time (posting time, anyway) is between 11:00 pm and midnight.
I've been thinking about rewriting the blog pretty much since I started it, what with new and better ASP.NET technologies coming out all the time. Perhaps year 10 will finally see that happen!
[categories]
blog, personal
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Thursday, 2 June 2011
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Blog feed fixed, oops
posted at
07:54 PM
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Reminders. You can subscribe to the entire blog feed this way:
http://www.mikepope.com/blog/blogfeed.rss
You can either get a truncated (2K/entry max) or full feed. The default is truncated. To get the full feed, do this:
http://www.mikepope.com/blog/blogfeed.rss?full=true
If you want to subscribe to only a specific category, you can do this:
http://mikepope.com/blog/blogfeed.rss?category=xxxxx
Examples of the latter:
http://mikepope.com/blog/blogfeed.rss?category=writing
http://mikepope.com/blog/blogfeed.rss?category=editing
http://mikepope.com/blog/blogfeed.rss?category=aspnet
http://mikepope.com/blog/blogfeed.rss?category=webmatrix
The truncated/full thing works here too. For example:
http://mikepope.com/blog/blogfeed.rss?category=webmatrix&full=true
I must note that the reason I started to suspect a problem was that I wasn't seeing accustomed levels of traffic. I pondered this problem off and on for a while and while I was doing something completely unrelated (isn't it always this way?), I had that aha! moment of realizing that it must be because the feeds were busted.
Anyway, hopefully the number of issues with the blog is gradually going down, dang.
[categories]
blog
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posted at
08:43 PM
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All in all, the move was not a huge problem. For all the fancy deployment facilities in VS, it was possible -- in fact, easier -- for me to just FTP the files over. As for the blog database, I used the Publish to provider feature in Visual Web Developer Express and exported the existing database as one honkin' big .sql script. Then I used SQL Server Management Studio Express to attach to the remote/hosting site SQL Server and run the script. That took, dunno, maybe 5 minutes.
The trickiest part so far, and one that isn't 100% settled, was configuring the hosted site to send email.
Two things amused me. One was that they said that provisioning the SQL Server database could take up to 24 hours. It took, like, 1 minute. Likewise they said that changing the target server for my domain (mikepope.com) would take 20 minutes and up to 48 hours. Again, less than a minute. Not that I'm complaining, nossir.
[categories]
blog
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Monday, 30 May 2011
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Moving the blog
posted at
12:00 AM
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posted at
01:02 AM
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 This is my first attempt, so I went with a button that shows up at the bottom of the entry. I was told that it's not bad idea to have a button at the top; a peculiar but attested behavior of users is that they'll sometimes "Like" something before they read it, or possibly without reading beyond the beginning. But let's see how this works out.
Implementing the button is not particularly difficult. The details are laid out on the Like Button page of the Facebook Developers site. In effect, what I did was add the following markup to the bottom of the layout for a blog entry (broken up here for readability):
<iframe src=
"http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=%%1%%
&layout=standard
&show_faces=False
&width=450
&action=like
&colorscheme=light
&height=80
&locale=en_US"
scrolling="no"
frameborder="0"
style="border:none; overflow:hidden; width:450px; height:30px;"
allowTransparency="true"></iframe>
I had to add some code to the page to substitute the URL of an individual blog entry (e.g., http://www.mikepope.com/blog/DisplayBlog.aspx?permalink=2272) for %%1%% in the markup. (The blog code is something of a rat's nest anyway, so what's another 4 lines for this?)
You're also supposed to add some meta tags to the <head> element that Facebook uses (they say) to determine what title, URL, and graphic to associate with the content. For example:
<meta property="og:title" content="mike's web log" />
<meta property="og:type" content="blog" />
<meta property="og:image"
content="http://www.mikepope.com/blog/images/mikesblog_defaultimage.png" />
<meta property="og:site_name" content="mike's web log" /> One thing that's implicit in the way they implement this, and is noticeable to me already, is that there is a slight delay before the Like button is displayed. Each instance of the Like button has to call the Facebook site and get data about the blog entry that the button is bound to, then return a hunk of markup to display on the page. I display 10 entries per page; that's 10 calls to Facebook. (Only one call, tho, if you're looking at an individual entry.) On the plus side, this is done asynchronously -- not AJAX-y, just via a queued HTTP request, like images. That means that the actual blog content shows up as it always has, it's just the Like button itself that might show up slightly later.
Anyway, we'll see how this goes. If you have some feedback about this, please leave a comment. And, of course, be sure to Like this. :-)
[categories]
blog
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Thursday, 29 October 2009
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That unmistakable sound
posted at
12:02 PM
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 I think that one of the disks on my server computer is dying -- it's making that spin-up-spin-down noise that they make just before they break. (Break your heart, that is.)[1]
If the blog disappears, it's because I'm, you know, servicing the server.
Once again I wonder whether it's really worth it to maintain my own server. Hmmm.
[1] As an aside, I got this image from a site that obviously is auto-translated. From what language, who knows. Here's an excerpt about the warning signs of incipient failure:
Symptoms of harder drive failure
The pre-warnings of harder drive abortion are not consistently accustomed by declining harder drive, if sometimes the agnate absurdity letters may arise and sometimes not. The a lot of accepted signs are beat or abrading sounds, while others, lower in ratings, cover aspersing arrangement achievement and abrupt behavior.
[categories]
personal, blog
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Thursday, 15 October 2009
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Foiled attack
posted at
02:07 PM
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<% foreach (var x in ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings){%><%= x.ToString() + "<br />" %><% } %>
This is an attempt, obviously, to get connection information about any and all databases that the blog has access to.
In this particular case, the attack was not successful because I encode stuff in comments, so it was just passed through as text. I sure hope that I've anticipated other, relatively straightforward attacks of a similar nature. But as we know, hackers are wily. And I am not particularly so, alas.
It goes to show that no matter how trivial your site, someone is interested in hacking it. Security: It's not just for commercial web sites.
[categories]
blog, aspnet
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posted at
10:14 PM
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Man, do I ever need to rewrite this creaking hunk o' software. Real Soon Now.
[categories]
blog
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Tuesday, 31 March 2009
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Blog feed changes
posted at
11:26 PM
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Anyway. If I broke your feed, let me know. PS Sorry if so.
One URL that should always work is this:
http://www.mikepope.com/blog/blogfeed.rss
or this:
http://www.mikepope.com/blog/blogfeed.rss?full=true
if you want full entries in the feed.
But of course that does not go through a subscription service.
[categories]
blog
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Tuesday, 24 February 2009
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Speaking of large numbers
posted at
09:59 AM
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As noted earlier, compared wtih actual, real blogs, this is nothing -- most of the people whose blogs I read pick up a million hits in months, if not weeks. But hey, it's sumpin' special for this blog, anyway.
So, 5-1/2 years, 2000 posts, a million hits, half a million words:
Blah-blah, yadda-yadda, a milestone hit today
A million times the server has been asked for to display
These pages of Verdana 8-point text all bluish gray
And weeks ago the blog post count inched slightly past 2K.
A half a million words, by god, so little to convey
You'd think by now I might have had some useful things to say. Haha.
[categories]
blog, personal
[tags]
hit count, word count
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