With Difficulty

In which FP muses on how hard it is to write something with all the distractions the modern world has to offer

Written by Forest Pines; published at 7:39 am on January 25th, 2010.
Filed under: Meta.

There’s one big problem with computers and pervasive connectivity. The problem is: it’s all at your fingertips. Which means, when you sit down to do some work, it’s all too easy to realise that there are other things you’d rather be doing; and there are a lot that can be done there and then.

In a lot of cases that’s straightforward to solve: disconnect yourself. It’s a bit trickier, though, when it comes to writing blog posts. Particularly, the sort of blog posts that need fact-checking, more information, and so on. Once you have to start doing that, you start getting sidetracked down a line of “research” which is very interesting and distracting, but doesn’t really help you with getting your blog post written. The inspiration fades away amid a mass of non-information.

What I’m going to have to do, I think, in order to get this process going properly again, is to make more notes. Get a notebook, and find a place far away from the internet. Hide my phone. Lie back in bed, maybe, and write my posts with pen and paper first. And after that, put all the links in and do the fact-checking, after the text is already down. It all goes back to something I wrote a long time back, wondering if having a Blog Editor would improve the quality of this blog. An independent Blog Editor is highly unlikely to appear, so I have to fulfil both roles myself; but if I do try to explicitly divide writing time and editing time, then maybe much more will get done.

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Keyword noise: blog, blogging, distraction, edit, editing, editor, internet, writing

Performance

In which things turn to treacle

Written by Forest Pines; published at 8:59 am on April 9th, 2009.
Filed under: Geekery.

I’ve noticed, over the past few months or so, that sometimes this site seems to load rather slowly. The slow periods didn’t seem to match any spikes in my own traffic, though, so I didn’t see that there was necessarily much I could do about it; moreover, as it wasn’t this site’s traffic that seemed to be causing the problem, I wasn’t under any obligation to do anything about it.

As I’ve mentioned before, a few months back I switched to Google Analytics for my statistics-tracking. Which is all well and good; it has a lot more features than I had available previously. Its only limitation is: it uses cookies and Javascript to do its work. Because of that, it only logs visits by real people, using real browsers,* and not spiders, robots, RSS readers or nasty cracking attempts. Often, especially if you’re a marketing person, that’s exactly what you want. If you’re into the geekery, though, it can cover up what’s exactly going on, traffic-wise, at the server level.

Searching my logs, rather than looking at the Google statistics, showed that I was getting huge numbers of hits for very long URLs, consisting of valid paths joined together by lots of directories named ‘&’:

That’s a screenshot of a single request in the logfile – the whole thing being about 850 characters long. ‘%26′ is an encoded ‘&’ character. Because of the way Wordpress works, these things are valid URLs, and requests for them were coming in at a pretty fast rate. Before long, the request rate was faster than the page generation time – and that’s when the problem really starts to build up, because from there things snowball until nobody gets served.

All these requests were coming from a single IP address, an ordinary consumer type of address in Italy.** Moreover, the user-agent was being disguised. Each hit was coming in from the same IP address, but with a different-but-plausible-looking user-agent string, so the hits looked like a normal, ordinary browser with a real person behind it.

The problem was solved fairly easily, to be honest; and the site was soon behaving itself again. It should still be behaving itself now. But if you came here yesterday afternoon and thought the site didn’t seem to be working very well, that’s why it was. I’m going to have to keep an eye on things, to see if it starts happening again.

* and only if they have Javascript enabled, at that, although I know that covers 99% of the known world nowadays.

** which made me think to myself: “I know I’ve pissed people off … but none of them are Italian!”

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Keyword noise: administration, Apache, blog, blogging, bot, performance, robot, speed, spider, web server, website, Wordpress

Public Information

In which people are alerted

Written by Forest Pines; published at 9:25 am on March 4th, 2009.
Filed under: Meta.

Just a quick post to say that: readers who normally use their RSS reader to look at this site might want to click through today. To see what everything now looks like. There aren’t many of you, but you are all regular readers, so I thought I’d let you know.

7 comments so far. »

Keyword noise: announcements, blog, blogging, design, information, web design

The size of things

In which we measure monitors

Written by Forest Pines; published at 9:14 am on March 3rd, 2009.
Filed under: Geekery, Meta.

The redesign is now almost done, which means that soon you’ll be saved from more posts on the minutiae of my redesign. It’s got me thinking, though: to what extent do I need to think about readers’ technology?

When this blog first started, I didn’t really worry about making it accessible to all,* or about making sure that the display was resolution-independent. It worked for me, which was enough. Over time, screens have become bigger; and, more importantly, more configurable, so I’ve worried less and less about it. When it came to do a redesign, though, I started to wonder. What browsers do my readers actually used.

Just after Christmas, for entirely different reasons, I signed up for Google Analytics, rather than do my own statistics-counting as I had been doing. Because Google Analytics relies on Javascript to do its work, it gives me rather more information about such things than the old log-based system did. So, last week, I spent an hour or so with my Analytics results and a spreadsheet. Here’s the graph I came up with:

The X-axis there is the horizontal width of everyone’s screens, in order but not to scale; the Y-axis is the cumulative percentage of visits.** In other words, the percentage figure for a given width tells you the proportion of visits from people whose screen was that size, or wider.

Straight away, really, I got the answer I wanted. 93% of visits are to this site are from people whose screens are 1024 pixels wide, or more. It’s 95% if I take out the phone-based browsers at the very low end.*** The next step up, though, the graph plunges to only 2/3 of visits. 1024 pixels is the smallest screen width that my visitors use heavily.

Admittedly there’s a bit of self-selection in there, based on the current design; it looks horrible at 800 pixels, and nearly everyone still using an 800×600 screen has only visited once in the two-month sample period. However, that applies to most of the people who visit this site in any case; just more so for the 800-pixel users. Something like 70% of visits are from people who have probably only visited once in the past couple of months; so it’s fair to assume that my results aren’t too heavily skewed by the usability of the current design. It will be interesting to see how much things change.

I’m testing the new design in the still-popular 1024×768 resolution, to make sure everything will still work. I’ll probably test it out a fair bit on K’s phone, too. But, this is a personal site. If you don’t read it, it’s not vital, to you or to me. If I don’t test it on 800×600 browsers, the world won’t end. The statistics, though, have shown me where exactly a cutoff point might be worthwhile.

* For example, in the code of the old design, all that sidebar stuff over on the right comes in the code before this bit with the content, which does (I assume) make it a bit of a bugger for blind readers. That, at least, will be sorted out in the new design.

** “visits” is of course a bit of a nebulous term, but that is a rant for another day.

*** Most of that 2% consists of: K reading the blog on the bus on her way home from work.

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Keyword noise: blog, blogging, browser, design, monitor, monitor resolution, resolution, screen, screen resolution, web browser, web design, width

Development

In which we anticipate the new design

Written by Forest Pines; published at 10:05 am on February 19th, 2009.
Filed under: Geekery, Meta.

Incidentally, the Grand Redesign plans, as mentioned here several times previously, are still trundling along at their own pace. Parts, indeed, have already been finished and are up on the server; although, as they’ve not been linked-to, nobody can get to them yet.

The slowest part, though, has been: backtracking through the entire post history and editing every post to conform to the new type: proper tags, proper excerpts, and so on. It’s a long slog, given that there are 3 1/2 years’ worth of posts,* and rereading them all has been hard work. It’s been a strange experience, too, because in many cases I’d forgotten an event, and reading all the posts jogged my memory in unexpected ways.**

The end is in sight now, though; so it won’t be long before I can check everything over, finish tidying up the new design, and put it all live. Fingers crossed that when it does go live, it’s all going to work.

* about 750ish, following the long hiatus last summer

** In some cases I’ve completely forgotten events – there are some posts where, if someone had showed them to me, I wouldn’t even have realised that I’d written them myself. And there are plenty of “guarded posts” where, now, a few years later, I’ve forgotten exactly what events I was describing

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Keyword noise: blog, blog design, blogging, design, filksonomy, folksonomy, memories, memory, reminder, rereading, tagging, tags, template design, web design, Wordpress

Classification

In which we discuss tagging and filksonomies

Written by Forest Pines; published at 9:40 am on January 28th, 2009.
Filed under: Meta.

Another design point that’s come up as part of the Grand Redesign I keep promising you: tagging. The little bundle of links at the bottom of each post that I didn’t really think did very much.

I was a latecomer to tagging. When this site first started, it didn’t have any for the first month or so. After a while I started adding them, pointing them to Technorati. Back then, Wordpress was still on version 1.5.something, and it didn’t have any built-in tagging support. I don’t like to have too many plugins, and I didn’t think that tag management* mattered that much; so I wrote all the tags manually. Like this:

<small>Keyword noise: <a class=”tag” rel=”tag” href=”…”>tag</a></small>

Which worked, quite well; there was a visually distinct “tag” class, because I wanted tag links – which all led to Technorati – to be visually distinct from the rest, which would go to something more topically relevant.

Things move on, though, and Wordpress has since gained built-in tagging functionality. Given that I’m redesigning the whole site, and putting in new built-from-scratch layout templates, I thought I may as well switch to using a more organising tagging system. For one thing, it means less typing each time I write a post. All that code up above is replaced by one little chunk in the template:

<p id=”thetags”><small><?php the_tags(‘Keyword noise: ‘, ‘, ‘ ,”);?></small></p>

I know all those commas and quotes look a bit confusing; but really they’re not that bad. And the point is: that bit of code there only has to be written once; the previous chunk had to be typed out every time. The most awkward part is that Wordpress isn’t flexible enough to let you set the class of each link individually, hence the <p class=”…”> at the start.** The big change this leads to, though, is that the tag links no longer point to Technorati. Now, they point back to the site itself: you get a page containing every post with that tag on. And, already, that’s shown that people do indeed click on the tags. People, particularly people coming from searches, do seem to use them. Whether they find them useful or not is another matter, of course;*** but they do get used.

Doing it this way means that I put more tags on each post, simply because there’s much less typing to do. Conversion, though, is going to be a bit of a job. There are 760-odd posts on this site, all of which I’m having to reread and re-tag. It’s going to take a while, but hopefully the majority of it will be done by the time the new design is finished.**** The only problem with this transitional phase is that: the current template is, because of its age, completely unaware of tags. So it doesn’t really know what a tag-based archive page is; so when you click on a tag, there’s no explanation as to what you’re looking at. I’m not sure if this is going to be a problem for you readers or not; and, hopefully, it’s only going to be a short-lived situation.

The word “folksonomy” has often been used to describe this sort of tagging system. I’m not sure it’s an ideal term for what I’m doing, though. “Filksonomy” might be more relevant: a bit like a folksonomy, but rather more whimsical and silly.

* as opposed to tagging itself.

** it has also buggered about with the quote marks in that fragment of code. Whatever you do, don’t copy and paste it – if you want to use it, retype it!

*** particularly now they point back within the site rather than outwards to see what other people have said on the topic.

**** In any case, there are other parts of the new design that also need each post checking and editing.

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Keyword noise: blog, blog design, blogging, CSS, design, filksonomy, folksonomy, HTML, tagging, tags, web design, Wordpress

Road trips

In which we discuss similarities between books and blogging

Written by Forest Pines; published at 9:56 am on January 26th, 2009.
Filed under: Artistic.

Last week, in the last Book I Haven’t Read post, I mentioned By Hook Or By Crook by David Crystal, and predicted that – in contrast to the book I was actually writing about – I’d have BHOBC rattled through and quickly finished off.

Well, indeed, I have: it’s read, finished, and back on the bookshelf now. Prediction correct. And, as I said before, I think it was easy to read precisely because it mirrors the way I think. To recap: it’s written as a road trip, during which the writer muses on anything, really, that he finds of interest as he passes. A nearby manor house reminds him of a railway engine named after it, which prompts him to muse on railway engine names in general. The journey from Anglesey to the mainland prompts him to recount the history of the Menai bridges,* and a trip to Hay-on-Wye leads to the history of inn signs, coats-of-arms, and many other things besides.

It’s a book of associations, and a celebration of associative thought. I’m sure that it didn’t actually take place as a single trip, and that when Crystal sat down to write the book he didn’t just muse on whatever came to mind; it’s too carefully structured and crafted for that. But it does read as if that’s what he’s doing. It made me think, moreover, of the way I write this blog, which isn’t at all carefully structured and crafted. But, as I move through the world, I see things which spark my brain alight and give me something to think about; and this blog is the result. It’s full of rambling and digression, but, rambling and digression with a common thread behind it, the thread being the things I encounter.**

I was thinking about this as I got towards the end of BHOBC. So, I was quite amused when I reached Crystal’s thoughts on blogging.

[Blogging] is writing which is totally spontaneous, put up on a screen without the intervention of an editor or proof-reader, so it is much more like ’speaking in print’ than anything before. And it shows many of the properties of spoken language, such as loosely constructed sentences and unexpected changes of direction. Bit like this book, really…

David Crystal has a blog.*** He started writing it at the end of 2006; he said, as a sort of FAQ page. Given that BHOBC was published in ‘07, though, I’d assume that he started blogging either a few months after the book had been written or when it was in the final stages of completion. I’m wondering if writing that book was one of the other things, though, that prompted him to start writing a blog. Because, really, they’re often exercises in a similar sort of vein. Spotting something that interests you, and telling other people about it.

* from building up to burning down, you could say

** Which is all a bit of a longwinded and pretentious way of saying: I write about whatever’s on my mind.

*** Which I linked to above, so you may well already realise this.

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Keyword noise: blog, blogging, books, By Hook Or By Crook, David Crystal, information, inspiration, interest, journey, language, road trip, travel, writing

We want information

In which FP gets described

Written by Forest Pines; published at 9:01 am on January 23rd, 2009.
Filed under: Meta.

Incidentally, K recently pointed out that the About Page on this site was severely out of date. And, indeed, it was. It was written when the site first appeared, and had barely been updated since then. In the time that this site’s been going a lot’s changed. I’ve met K, for one thing, moved across the country, been abroad a couple of times, learned a lot, and become slightly more optimistic about life in general. The old About Page really would have confused anyone who’d come across the site at random, read it, and tried to match the description there to the description of my life now.

So: the other day, it got rewritten. I’m still not entirely happy with it, but self-descriptions are one of the hardest things in the language to write. Next time I do one, I’ll just get other people to describe me instead, I think; it will probably be far more accurate.

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Keyword noise: about, blog, blogging, description, information, know thyself, pen portrait, self-knowledge, self-portrait, self-portrayal, update, websites

Design points

In which nothing, design-wise, is accomplished

Written by Forest Pines; published at 10:00 am on January 11th, 2009.
Filed under: Meta.

As I mentioned recently, I’m embarking on a Grand Epic Ground-Upwards Redesign of this site, because, well, the design hasn’t been changed since I first set it up. I knocked it together in a few days holiday in August ‘05; back then my holiday year ended in August and I often had a few spare days at the end of the month where I had nothing to do and needed to keep myself occupied. In 2005, this blog was the result.

Anyway, my point is: it was put together in a bit of a hurry, with most of the design code ripped out of a standard theme I downloaded, without me really understanding what each bit did. The design’s always had a few rough edges, and there are lots of things that I’ve meant to develop further but never have. Hopefully, some of those points will be addressed, attacked, and taken by storm.

Thinking about the design, though, and what I want it to achieve, has made me thnik about one of the things I was most unhappy with when I first put this site together. One of the things I liked about this theme when I first saw it was:* the little boxes for the date on each post. You know, these ones:

But one thing I didn’t like, though, was the cardinal number. Maybe it’s because I’m English, that that’s how I was taught, but when I read a date, I always read it with an ordinal number. “January 11th”, not “January 11″.

I can’t remember, to be honest, if it was possible to fix that easily when I first started using Wordpress. Possibly it was, possibly it was something that’s been added later.** In any case, I didn’t fix it. I know I tried to, at one point; but abandoned the fix and didn’t go back to it. Then I forgot the issue, until, coming back to the redesign, I tried the fix again the other day. When I retried it, I remembered that I’d given it a go before. Because this is the result

Those two extra characters mean that on most days, the text is just marginally too long to fit in the box. The box gets pushed down. Which isn’t so bad; but, it doesn’t always happen. You can’t necessarily know what the date box will look like; how it will relate to the elements around it. Moreover, I don’t know how it will look on other computers, where the fonts have slightly differing metrics to mine.

There are ways to fix it, of course. The box could be slightly wider. I could make sure that the horizontal line always comes underneath the date box, although that might leave annoying white space under the post title. The question, though, is whether it’s worth doing. However many times I tweak it, I’m not sure I’d ever get it quite right based on the current design.

And so, this all is partly why I’m going to start pretty much from scratch. The risk is that I’ll reinvent the wheel; the upside is that at least I’ll know how it works from its heart.

* and still is

** To be pedantic: it’s not a feature of Wordpress itself, it’s a feature of PHP, the underlying language. I’m too lazy to go back through PHP’s version change logs and find out when the feature in question – the “S” character in date formatting strings – was added.

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Keyword noise: beauty, blog, CSS, design, experiments, perfection, PHP, tweaking, web design, Wordpress

Upgrade

In which I try to update the site

Written by Forest Pines; published at 3:33 pm on January 6th, 2009.
Filed under: Meta.

An administrative note: I’ve just upgraded the site to Wordpress 2.7, the new, latest version, before I start on the planned epic redesign. And: it’s different. To you, the site itself should look just the same as before. On the underside, writing and managing the site, it looks completely different. I’m all-at-sea. Everything has moved about, and it’s going to take me a few days to relearn how to work the thing. That’s upgrades for you.

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Keyword noise: blog, learning, upgrade, web design, websites, Wordpress