BPI inside

Tag: Computer/Programming

  • Blog experiments

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  • Blog URL changed

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  • Spam Wars – The Empire strikes back

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  • MovableType rebuild weirdness and blog updates

    I’ve mentioned that there are some problems with this blog in the past. I wasn’t able to fix the problem when users post comments though but I fixed some discomfort on my side.

    I often wondered why rebuilding the monhly archive was done in 100-entries-steps altough I had set the setting 

    EntriesPerRebuild 10

    I somehow came across this topic in the MovableType Community Forums which suggests to modify some multiplicators in one of MovableType’s core files.

    I dug a bit into that and investigated the file lib/MT/App/CMS.pm myself. And there, around line 3495 I found following block, just above the _start_rebuildpages function definition:

    my %Limit_Multipliers = (
    Individual => 1,
    Daily => 2,
    Weekly => 5,
    Monthly => 10,
    Dynamic => 5,
);

    Obviously these are multiplicators to the EnriesPerRebuild setting but I have no idea why this behaviour is neither configurable via the standard configuration options nor why this is not documented anywhere.

    I changed down all of those settings to 1 and now a full site rebuild runs through without any HTTP 500 error, altough the rebuild-status window refreshes much more often now. The commenting error still persists… sigh

    Have also been playing around a bit with another visitor statistics tool to get somehow rid of the LevelTen Hit Counter which has served quite well until now but still has a few annoyances. For example it regulary wants to contact it’s producers homepage for "updates". Besides the privacy issue with this it just doesn’t work on on all of my computers/browsers except one. And it refuses to work until it is up-to-date again. With the help of the Web Traffic Analysis Index of AdvanceScripts Script Resource Directory I found the phpMyVisites PHP package. It showed a nice layout and almost the same functionality as the LevelTen Hitcounter and so I decided to give it a try.

    Currently both hitcounters are running side-by-side so that I can compare them better but I’m looking forward dropping the old one in the not so far future.

  • Spam Wars

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  • Blog update problems

    I’ve been having problems with posting and updating entries on this blog for quite some time now. Eventually I found out that I can work around posting problems when I did an index-rebuild after posting an entry. This didn’t solve the underlying problem but since I thought that only I as poster was faced with problems I didn’t investigate further in this issue.

    Well, my thought was wrong and readers are too faced with this problem. More precisely readers are running into errors when they try to post comments or trackbacks.

    So I dug a bit deeper into the problem and found out that the server stops the MovableType process because it’s taking too long to rebuild the pages after a new post, comment or trackback has been published. It’s being written to the database but the update of the webpage just takes too long to complete.

    Even further down the ultimate cause seems to lie in the feature of my category archives which contain all posts in that category since the start of my blog.

    I’ll try to find an alternate solution for these archives to get rid of the problems. Expect weird behaviour for them in the meantime!

  • Small updates & RSS feed change

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  • Clever way of earning money with free software

    Just found a quite clever way of producing free software without starving in poverty. On DonationCoder.com they are offering some quite clever little tools (like the tiny FindRun Robot) for free download yet encouraging the user to donate any amount of money.

    They do this by just requiring a free license to open the software for 6 months. After this time another 6-month license is required. Finally after a year of free use the user can get an unlimited license for free again. On the other side if you donate even the smallest amount of money you can get the unlimited license and many other benefits instantly, forever.

    I like this concept and it again throws me into thinking of creating a PayPal account for such small things.

    Other things which already have pushed my mind into this directions are for example my favourite webcomic, Dominic Deegan, where you get a nice desktop wallpaper each month for as little as 1$ or many of those little or not-so-little OpenSource software things which I use all the time.

  • Hacking the router

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  • Linux and broadband progress

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