Ralford.net

  [Ralford.net]

After an afternoon of coding, Ralford.net weblog posts and wiki entries now support footnotes. I've wanted them for some time, because footnotes let the author introduce a relevant idea, but allow them to present the idea in such away that it doesn't crowd the main article's content.

Most footnote styles I have seen create a literal footnote, and place the reference at the bottom of the page (Wikipedia and WordPress). I tried to think of an alternative implementation, and came up with a CSS-driven mouse-over footnote. This works out well for content that doesn't need to be printed, because it keeps the reader from having to jump around the page.

As you may have noticed, the footnotes are a big buggy, but the bugs primarily revolve around CSS issues, and shouldn't impact usability. The hovering is currently not supported in Internet Explorer, but as I learn more about CSS, I hope to change that.

I've since updated old posts using "brute force" footnotes to this new style, which is based on CSS.

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  [Ralford.net]

I've noticed descriptive titles in tons of webpages (especially weblogs), but it didn't occur to me that the title tag plays a role search engines rank. I always saw the title tag as a usability thing: if I have multiple Firefox tabs open that belong to the same domain, I can quickly read the tab to see which one I want to make active.

According to the SEO experts at SEOmoz.org, the top positive factor that helps with a website's Google ranking is using keywords in the title tag. Last night, I added this enhancement to the posts and wiki entries on Ralford.net.

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  [Ralford.net]

Ever since I started using Firefox 2, my Live Bookmark for Ralford.net has been giving me an ugly "Live Bookmark feed failed to load" error.

I went to the address of the feed in Firefox, only to find that I was prompted to add the feed as a Live Bookmark (my previous install of Firefox let me view the XML source). So I dusted off my Internet Explorer icon, and loaded the feed from there. It did some debugging for me, and pointed out I'm not allowed to use HTML's non-breaking spaces in a weblog entry. I removed the space, but found that the feed still threw an error.

Next I went to FeedValidator.org, and found that my feed was valid, but a guid tag was recommended as a sub-element for the item tag. I converted my link tags to guid tags, and now my feed is happily loading as a Live Bookmark in Firefox 2.

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  [Ralford.net]

Early this year mysterious internet robots where leaving thousands of comments on my posts. This was a problem to the extent that my site actually ran out bandwidth for a month. Finally, I've implemented a secret word system which will hopefully trick the bots during their efforts to comment about viagra. Kindly note that the secret word itself is not "viagra".

So if you'd like, drop me a line. And please do let me know if you find a a bug!

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  [Ralford.net]

If you ever go to my weblog's homepage, you've probably noticed I've been using Google Adsense as a source of income. Income is a funny word, especially when considering I've raised an entire $4.38 USD in the two year span I've been a member of the ad program.

I logged in to Adsense the other day to see how much dough was pouring in, only to find a friendly help message stating the obvious: ads should be located on pages that people visit the most. I thought about this for a moment, then realized that most of my non-random visitors get here via the Build Your Own PVR website. Some months back, I built my own PVR, and created a wiki entry for it - Building my PVR (w) - which was eventually refered to by the BYOPVR wiki page...

And so, the Ralford.net board of directors (otherwise known as the Ralford.net "blogger" in fancy terms) has voted to add Google Ads to the wiki entry pages of Ralford.net. The hope is to raise money and get the weblog (hardly a tripod) to the point where it can support itself, much like a responsible adult.

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  [Ralford.net]

Because I haven't taken the time to verify a visitor isn't malicious, the easy-to-use links for creating weblog comments and new wiki entries have been taken over by the internet robots we know and love. Therefore, I've temporarily removed the links and used the DEL tag to strike them out: By "temporarily" I mean that they will remain like this until I get around to reprogramming things. As you can see by today's date, I haven't updated this weblog in an ice age.

Also, I apologize for deleting the one or two real comments in the weblog that were left by real visitors - the SQL query I wrote to kill the malicious comments must have had a syntax error.

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  [Ralford.net]

There's much to be done, but with the help of phpThumb (w), I'll have an interface for adding images to Ralford.net. Here's a quick sample to show the image support I'm adding to the weblog and wiki:

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  [Ralford.net]

Yep, the Ralford-dot-net wiki is finally running. You may find that it's fairly buggy for now, but it's a start. I would still like to add some more features and also move some things around. Specifically, it's completely database driven, and I've been thinking about using the database to generate static HTML pages.

You can learn about the wiki here: Ralford's Wiki Howto (w) If you would like to screw around with your own wiki entry, get started in the Sandbox (w).



Static pages, hah! Check out: Optimizing Dynamic Webpages (w)

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  [Ralford.net]

I'm in the process of adding home-brewed wiki support to ralford-dot-net. I came up with the idea of calling it a "bliki" the other night, but later found out that the idea already exists: Martin Fowler's Bliki. (his Five Pound Bag post is amusing)

The basic idea of a bliki is to have a wiki whose entries can be referred to directly from a weblog. I'll be tweaking ralford-dot-net quite a bit this weekend, and hope to get a basic wiki running soon.

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  [Ralford.net]

I've been working for about 9 months now, and I haven't updated my weblog in years. So much of a weblog this has been. All of the crappy technology posts I've written before this one. Well I've had enough of that. From now on, I'm gonna write whatever the hell I want. And if I write about computer crap, then so be it.

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