The world according to Sven-S. Porst
« ΑΘΗΝΑ 2004 •
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448 words
Little Changes happening everywhere around here
- I recently updated style sheet for my pages a little. The link boxes at the left and right are less visible now.
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I’ve added word counts in a few places – and image counts in a few others.
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We’ve got monthly archives now – mostly for my own amusement, I suppose.
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The weekly archives are back as well, mostly for ‘legacy’ reasons having to do with old links, and have been updated to only contain links to the proper entries rather than the full text.
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The same is true for the category archives which are only linking to the text now rather than displaying it. I fear this may hurt my standing with Google, but people coming and loading the large pages with all the images – quite a few by now in the case of music and books, used quite a bit of bandwidth.
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The main archive page has been slightly updated as well.
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Finally, I cleaned up the layout of the comment form, leaving out everything nobody seems to use anyway (is that true?), and adding a little blurb on comment moderation.
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While I remain sceptical about Markdown, I’ve now set it up so people can use it in comments as I find it quite convenient on other people’s sites or the BibDesk wiki. I hope you’ll find it convenient.
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Another thing I’ve been sceptical about is that del.icio.us web link collector. I’ve given it a short test-drive now. And while I’m still not convinced it’s a good thing because my data resides on someone else’s server and is only available online, I must say that it is seductively easy to use. I am a big friend of free-form data entry and their categorising system does just that. No silly setups, just a bit of quick typing and there you are.
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A less public change has to do with my e-mail. I am using an elaborate system of tunneling for my e-mail. Coming to think of it, some of my messages may be encrypted four-fold (WEP encryption on Airport, Cisco VPN connection, ssh tunnel to mail server, encryption in Mail) which is a bit silly. Regarding the ssh tunnel I use to get to my mailserver reliably and securely from wherever I am, I was provided with a helpful script that opens the connection alive. Now, Steffen came up with an even cleverer way of doing this and helped me set it up. Doing this took me through more intestines of computers that I had hoped, including ssh keys, xinetd, NetInfo and one or two other things. So far it works really well and fully automatically.
August 14, 2004, 13:59
del.icio.us completely rocks the house. I know you’re not a true believer in linkblogs, but if you’re going to run one del.icio.us makes it effortless — just funnel their RSS into your site somewhere and you’re done.
I was skeptical about Markdown at first, too, but I’ve found it really does speed things up when I’m preparing a big hunk of web text. Having it work as a service really does make it pretty effortless to use everywhere.
August 14, 2004, 16:15