Alden Bates' Weblog

I'm having an odd problem with Movable Type - when I first save a new post, it has a superfluous link to the "Next Post", which actually links to the first post I made. This looks odd, since someone will spot the post on Technorati and click on the next post link, only to end up on my first post (which is now slightly inaccurate, as LJ have implemented categories, as per my previous post, but I digress, often and at length, in fact).

As I say, this happens when I save a new post. If I go edit the post and save without changing anything, the useless "next post" link vanishes. Typically, no one else on the Interweb appears have have had the same trouble.

Must be something odd in the coding of MTEntryNext which causes this...

There's a page devoted to links to sites of Marvel comics workers, one of whom is named "Mel Bush". I'm fairly certain it's not the same Mel Bush that the Mel Bush page on my site is about, because, for one thing, that Mel Bush is a fictional character and unlikely to be drawing comics for Marvel. The proprietor of that site doesn't appear to have checked and gone ahead and linked anyway.

Not that I'm going to complain about getting links, but if you're going to link to a page, at least check that the page is what you think it is.

For some reason I'm completely unable to load anything on that domain - I presume they've blocked all traffic from Xtra for some reason, because I always get a timeout. Google's cache is a wonderful thing.

Tonight I wrote a wee program* which scans the tetrap.com site mirror I have sitting on my hard drive, grabs all the external links, and checks said external links by doing a head request. Thusly I can locate and fix any dead links.

Dead links are a big problem on the web. Putting a link on my web page is a risk, because at some point in the future that link has a high probability of going "dead" (the page is gone), redirecting, or even redirected to a porn site. As a surfer, it's annoying to click on a link looking for some information, only to find the page has disappeared, so as a webmaster, I make it a practice of checking my links semi-regularly to make sure they all work and go where intended. Since tetrap.com is pretty large, I have to use a link-checking program...

Which caused me to ponder another question: Why do webmasters have to check their links independently? It seems to me that search engines have already done all the work. They've crawled my pages (so they know which URLs I'm linking to) and they've crawled the pages I'm linking to (because that's what search engines do) so it follows Google, Yahoo!, MSN, etc, already know which of my pages have dead links on them. Wouldn't it be nice if one of them provided some easy way for me to get this information so I don't have to go checking the links myself?

Given the high percentage of pages out there containing dead links, such a service would probably be well received...

* So if you got any funny hits on your web site from "tetrap.com link checka", that was my 1337 programming skillz.

Jonas Luster linked to a CSS cheat sheet. This will make my development sooooo much easier. Also finally I can see how to make paragraphs indent on the first line only, which I'd previously assumed CSS couldn't do, simply because I couldn't find the correct syntax anywhere in the CSS spec.

Now I cry with happiness.

Dear Google,
Thou art on crack.

My crappy downloads page should not outrank the official BBC Doctor Who site. That's... seriously wrong.

If you search on Google for Doctor Who fan club, the top result is currently the NZDWFC page. I'm not entirely sure how that happened, but I'm not complaining either. :)

After all, these days Google is everything.

OK, I've set up a new bunch of templates for Movable Type, so that my weblog finally looks more like the rest of my site. I've only hit one problem: when you use the search box on the main page, the search results come up in the default MT template.

There isn't a template listed for the search results in MT's configuration, and there isn't any mention of one in the manual entry for templates. Yet in the manual entry for template tags, there's a whole section on using search result tags in your "search templates".

So far as I can tell, you have to construct the search templates as standalone files and upload them yourself. This seems an odd way of doing it when the rest of the templates are stored in the database!

My site (or the Mel Bush page at least) was mentioned in a thread about the recent leak of the first new Doctor Who episode. Well, not in a good way, since they were disparaging Bonnie (but that's Slashdot for ya). Grrr!

But Slashdotting ain't what it used to be, so the traffic to my main site merely doubled for a day or so and the Mel Bush page got an extra 200 or so hits.

Also a bunch of message boards linked to the post on the NZDWFC Message board about the leaking of same episode, so a few people have trickled through there... (more, ironically than from Slashdot).

I upgraded the hotlink prevention on tetrap.com to use a method suggested by Smarter Image Hotlinking Prevention on A List Apart. I have a lot of trouble with hotlinkers, mainly from message boards and people linking to album covers from EBay.

The new method allows linking to pictures like so but prevents the use of the img tag for imbedding. I've implemented the script in Perl rather than PHP, and it also checks to make sure the image exists (and returns a 404 if it doesn't), so is a slight improvement over the A List Apart method.

I'm scratching my head trying to work out why upgrading Movable Type isn't easier. MT has a website, my MT install is running on a web server which is by definition connected to the web. Why can't I just push a button on my MT install and have it automatically grab the updated files from MT's site?

Or am I missing something? Maybe there is a button and I just haven't seen it.

Imagine my surprise after I merged my page of LiveJournal stuff into my main domain (it previously occupied my ISP-given webspace) and got a hold of the site stats to find it is almost the most popular part of my site.

I therefore decided I should probably update it, so I've added a page of Star Trek: Voyager icons (all but one previously posted here), some Greg the Bunny icons to the miscellaneous icons page and another Unreal Tournament 2k4 icon.

Some of them may even be good.

A while ago I placed a text ad on BlogShares and only got one hit as a result. When I moved my mood icons/user icons pages to a new location, I thought I'd give it another try and set up an ad for 100,000 impressions.

From those impressions, I got a total of 57 hits. Most of them were from individual blog pages, or the main text ads page. Not a huge return rate, but it still made BlogShares the second biggest referrer (not counting search engines) for the main Tetrap domain for December.

Speaking of referrers, the referrer-spamming bots have been hitting my site again - one hit the NZDWFC site some 150 times or so this month. I've taken to banning any such bots on sight. They're so stupid and easy to spot too.

Take two, as I managed to crash Firefox last time...

Ya know what I'm tired of? Referrer spammers. Seriously, I'm tired of seeing a bizarre site pop up in the referrer list, and going to visit it, only to discover it's some completely irrelavant site selling yoghurt or something. No, really, WTF?

There were still some 3000 or so 301 redirections, again, mostly due to Yahoo, but judging by a recent post on the Yahoo! Search Blog they're on top of it. Excellent. Now about some of those other search crawlers (Grub, for instance, doesn't treat 301 redirections properly).

Anyway, on with the pointless stuff: Ze most popular DiscContinuity Guide Entries were:

1. Land of the Dead
2. The Twilight Kingdom
3. Davros
4. Storm Warning
5. The Natural History of Fear

We are behind on those. People will be punished. Or something. Anyway, the most popular NZDWFC archive items were:

1. Moonboots and Dinner Suits review
2. Who Killed Kennedy eBook
3. I Exterminated JNT
4. Build Your Own TARDIS review
5. Davros artwork

So much the same as last time, only with an added obsession for moon boots. Why, I wonder...

I administer a web ring on webring.com. At the moment I'm finding this difficult, as any time I attempt to load webring.com, it times out. If I load it via Google language tools it works fine. Webring.com Fanlisting works fine.

So evidently there's a problem somewhere between me and webring.com that's stopping me from loading the pages. I would contact webring for help in solving the problem, but all they have is a feedback form and no apparent helpdesk email address. They suggest on the support page to ask in the forums, which I would do if I was able to load the forums (directly) at all.

Thus we have a catch 22 - I am unable to load webring.com, and I am unable to obtain help because doing so requires loading webring.com.

I am going to attempt to guess a support email address in the hope someone there is monitoring that address and can help.

Popular DiscContinuity Guide entries

1. The Twilight Kingdom
2. Land of the Dead
3. The Natural History of Fear
4. Zagreus
5. Davros

Most of the Land of the Dead hits appear to be coming from Google searches. Alden's conjuncture for web pages: For any web page, over it's lifetime online, the majority of hits will come from people who will have stumbled on it from a search engine while searching for a way to get jam stains out of their curtains.

Still amusingly popular is a page of convention photos from StarFest 2002. 711 hits. The majority from people searching for picture of Toby McGuire.

The same albums on my music site keep ending up in the top 5, since there seem to be a lot of people searching for Era's The Mass and The Celtic Circle, which doesn't make for very dynamic rankings. See above.

Archived TSV items

1. Recovered clips press release
2. Who Killed Kennedy eBook
3. I exterminated JNT
4. Peanuts cartoon
5. Davros and Daleks artwork

I wish I could say my attempts to fix the indexing on Yahoo! was working. Most of the old NZDWFC urls have gone, however it's not indexing the nzdwfc.tetrap.com subdomain at all well. :P