Green

Don't do this

2007-09-19T17:36:23Z

You're running a web studio, something changes and you decide the website must be updated, you look at the website and decide it is so horribly out of date and it must go too, you put up a holding page with some cool message about impending "newness". Your spine shivers as you imagine the Internet buzzing with anticipation about your new site. In the real world those of us searching for web studio services come to your site and find nothing of interest, no portfolio, no winning argument to use you, and quickly move on. "Frank":http://www.frankbelfast.com/ will apparently have a new site someday, but not today.

Watching 404s Daily

2007-08-15T11:13:11Z

So I'm looking after a couple of medium/small sized corporate internet sites now and it's time to start monitoring. The first thing I want to do is to watch the Apache logs of our sites for 404s, so this goes into /etc/cron.daily:

#! /bin/sh
#
# cron script to report
# top 50 errors in apache log
#
# Written by Stephen Stewart 

if [ -f /var/log/apache2/access.log ]; then
  awk -F\" '/ 404 /{ print $2 }' \
  /var/log/apache2/access.log | \
  awk '{ print $2 }' | \
  sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -50 | \ 
  mailx -s "[my.site.com] 404s" email@address.com
fi

As time goes by I'll start doing things like watching for "validation errors":http://green.carisenda.com/archive/2007/01/eternal_vigilen.html and "spelling mistakes":http://green.carisenda.com/archive/2006/04/sgmlspellchecke.html, but right now things are so messy that's a little ambitious. :) *Update:* Awk can grep too, thanks petemc.

Poems on the Move

2007-08-14T11:30:24Z

"QR code":http://qrcode.kaywa.com/ for my "Poems on the Move":http://1.61803.mobi/ site, a wee site for your mobile that'll give you a random poem to read on the train/bus/loo.

One's too many an' a hundred's not enough

2007-08-04T12:57:39Z

I'm 34 now, it happened yesterday in Dublin. Much less painful than the first 4 of these 3-somethings this one was actually enjoyable. Thirty-something is shaping up to be a good something to be. I pity the twenty-somethings, all new shoes and haircuts.

And the sky was made black with unescaped entities

2007-07-20T14:08:39Z

The decision to serve your web site pages as application/xhtml+xml should be taken while wearing a Bruce Willis' vest and Guns n' Roses playing in the background. You want a Jerry Bruckheimer sunset, heat haze and all, the whole scene tinted Michael Mann blue, an offshore breeze, the sound of Kilgore's 'choppers in the air. A hawt chick sobbing as she cries your name will also help set the mood. Milk it for all you are worth because you are not coming back alive.

Mother is it just a waste of time?

2007-07-18T13:01:15Z

I don't want to work anymore. I just want to find a beach on an island in the pacific and waste away, grow a beard, eat a fish or two. Ooo babe, of course Momma's gonna help build the wall...

Things.

2007-07-02T23:42:20Z

I've been commuting to Dublin these last two weeks, it's not been nice I can tell you. More than 3 hours one way each day, I've been like a zombie in work. Zomb.ie. I've met an Australian and we're shacking up together, she's a rugby playing kick boxer. Good times. The entire world seems to have descended on "Facebook":http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=667260087, at first I was apprehensive but now I embrace. My taxi driver tonight used to travel down to Dublin every day too. For the greyhounds. I love Wii Tennis and Wii Bowling.

Rant

2007-07-01T00:25:40Z

All hail the great God Science, our Lord and Master, in whom we will believe without questioning, without understanding and as reported to us by journalists.

Shift Happens

2007-06-24T02:54:03Z

Au Revoir Thierry

2007-06-23T11:35:11Z

Thierry Henry has left Arsenal, the most beautiful and eloquent exponent of the game of football has left London for Barcelona and I'm quite sad about that.

The Times They Are A-Changin'

2007-06-11T20:56:45Z

"GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 8397 "-"
  "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en)
  AppleWebKit/522.11.3 (KHTML, like Gecko)
  Version/3.0 Safari/522.11.3"

We had a quarrel, a lovers spat

2007-06-09T19:01:19Z

Status: 5.0.0
Diagnostic-Code: X-Postfix; host said: 550
    sorry, no mailbox here by that name (#5.1.1)
    (in reply to RCPT TO command)

Hey, I have a new job

2007-06-09T12:25:18Z

I have a new job starting on Monday! It's pretty exciting actually, interesting work, new faces, all that. I'll be moving to Dublin as soon as I can sell a kidney to pay for somewhere to stay. :) A few notes on my job hunt: * I went to over 20 interviews. * Only 3 interviews were for companies in Belfast. * The 3 Belfast companies ask me questions about what "Front":http://www.designbyfront.com/ do, not what I do. * "Front":http://www.designbyfront.com/ is far and away the best web application design company in Belfast. * I found my job through "Monster.ie":http://www.monster.ie. * "CWjobs.co.uk":http://www.cwjobs.co.uk was also very productive. * Hiring a professional company to write your CV is a good idea unless you're a CV writing expert. * Recruiters generally don't have a good understanding of the field of web design, finding one that does is a great help. * Recruiters in Belfast are generally rubbish, they're only interested in the small set of skills for the small group of companies that serve Belfast's IT sector. * Don't expect big companies to have good interview processes. * Find out as much about the job as you can in the interview, you're interviewing them as much as they are you. * A good salary does not equal a good job.

Vote Belfast onto the New Monopoly Board

2007-05-19T14:34:02Z

"Add your vote to get Belfast on the Monopoly Here & Now UK Edition":http://www.monopoly.co.uk/vote.aspx. Since our property market feels like people are playing with Monopoly money I think it's only fair we're on the new Monopoly board.

HTML5: HTML WG Pleb Report

2007-05-18T16:23:36Z

So the HTML WG have voted to adopt the WHAT WG HTML5 as the basis for further discussion and what not. That's about all I can tell you, for the rest I'm out of my depth, but I'll do my best to explain. It's early days though, expect change. I understand that Apple, Mozilla, Opera (and IE?) want a single "here's how to render the web" document, and in doing so will sensuo stricto standardise what some consider bad behaviour in HTML authoring, however it'll not mean it's OK to go out and overlap and tags, just that somewhere in the spec there's a section on how a browser should deal with it when that happens. So in a sense you have two documents, 'How the Web Should be Rendered' and 'How the Web Should be Written'. Then you have the HTML language itself, is it purely structural? Personally I'm of the opinion HTML would be the worse off if it was shorn altogether of it's presentational abilities. I want my mum to be able to put up a simple HTML page with bold face, italics, paragraphs and what have you with no need to look at CSS or think about the semantics of italics for latin, ship names or speech emphasis -- my mum will just want to put those in italics and let the reader make their mind up. Simple documents, with the basics of document presentation, should be possible in HTML only in my opinion. Lot's of people don't agree though. Semantics is also being discussed, giving the language more meaning, presumably for some yet to be invented machine to come and gobble up the data (if you build it they will come). Microformats, using predefined classes, new tags, new attributes. I'm going to leave this one alone for a bit 'til it settles down, I feel there's a lack of a real goal here and it's all a bit idealistic. But what do I know? Accessibility concerns have been raised by "Roger Johansson":http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200705/another_look_at_html_5/ but so far other than asking to keep what we already have I don't think anything new has been proposed. I may be wrong though, there was a period the mailing list was over 100 messages per day and I'll be honest I missed quite a few. I think possibly there's some regret at letting plebs like me join the working group, there's even been some discussion of having an "invited pleb" category instead of "invited expert". I'll happily sign up, I haven't the slightest clue what some people are talking about.