Websiting

This morning I decided to check the web server logs to see if there were any problems with my sites. But I found that awstats hadn't been updating as I had forgotten to update the awstats config files when I moved the log files location.

After updating the config files, I got awstats to update with the log files it had missed (which was since mid-October). Thankfully I still had the batch script I used last time this happened, so I modified that with the missed log dates, and then updating was easy.

I found that I had a 500 error on a couple of my pages. When I looked into this it was because I was missing the PEAR Mail_mime module, so I installed that and it fixed it. When looking into this problem I also found some problems with another page, so I fixed that too.

In the afternoon I was trying to set up my host gator account. I managed to get a subdomain of one of my sites pointing at my host gator account. I also managed to get a different domain pointing at hostgator while the subdomains pointed to webFaction (my current host).

But I couldn't sftp into my host gator account, so after quite a while of trying different things and reading the host gator help topics I gave up and sent them an email to get some help.

I read a few articles on the Luminous Landscape until it was dinner time.

After dinner I watched an episode of DS9 with Mauser and Bo, did a Japanese lesson with Mauser, then finished reading the latest Luminous Landscape articles.

After that I checked my email and had received a reply from Host Gator. It seems they have to enable ssh access for you to be able to use it / sftp. I followed their instructions on setting up the ssh keys so that I could login to sftp without being prompted for a password: SSH Keys.

This worked okay, but my shell script to ftp the images from my current host to host gator didn't seem to work, so I'll have to try and find what the problem with that is tomorrow.

Various

Today I was mainly working on my ebay listings widget. It wasn't displaying the listings titles correctly and also the ebay logo had disappeared.

After looking into this I found the problem was that two of the listing titles were really long and with no spaces in them.

Now I knew what the problem was, I just had to figure out how to solve it. The answer was the CSS rule

word-wrap: break-word

.

However, this didn't work in IE8 and 9. I found two solutions for IE8 and 9 - one was to use

word-break: break-all

. Unfortunately this meant that the text would break at the edge of the container even if the text contained spaces, e.g.

this is some text that has break-all applied

The other solution was making sure that the element that the word-wrap was applied to had hasLayout. Unfortunately setting

zoom: 1

didn't seem to work, but setting

display: block

did work.

It didn't work completely though - despite the long titles now wrapping, the table cells containing the titles were still expanded to the unwrapped size of the title. This in turn pushed the whole size of the table larger. And so the ebay logo that was floated right in the table's <caption> was outside the containing <div> and couldn't be seen.

To fix this I just set a fixed width on the <caption> to make sure it wouldn't expand outside the containing <div>.

I also wrote a blog post for my photo website about the print I ordered from SnapMad.com, and tried again to adjust the autofocus on my D200. I couldn't do it though, and so ordered a set of Allen keys from Amazon that look like they have longer handles than the ones I currently have.

In the evening I watched an episode of DS9 with Mauser and Bo. Then I spent quite a while looking at the In the picture website that I'm going to be helping out the local event.

I also watched an episode of Magi Rangers with Bo as well.

Pano processing

Today I went to Church and also updated my pog website as normal.

I also finished processing the panos that I took yesterday and watched an episode of DS9 with Mauser and Bo.

Cinnamon Whirl making and photo taking

I spent all of this morning making Cinnamon Whirls.

After lunch I did some washing up and then watched an episode of Zeo Rangers with L. After that me, L, and Mauser went on a walk. When we got home I rushed out again to try and get some sunset photos from Farndon Fields.

Unfortunately I was a bit too late and the sun was just setting behind the hill as I got there, but I still took a few panos anyway.

When I got home I copied the pics across to my comp and then geo-coded them all. After that I started work on processing one of the panos.

In the evening I watched an episode of Star Trek DS9 with Mauser and Bo, then finished processing the pano I was working on.

I went on Animal Crossing with Mauser and Bo, and we all went to see K.K. play. After that I started processing another pano, then went to bed.

Various

This morning I processed a pano from our trip to Korea, now over a year ago.

Yesterday when sorting a few Korea photos taken with the Nikon 50mm f/1.4D lens, I noticed that they were back focused.

So in the afternoon today I took some test photos with the lens on my D200, and found that it did have a back focusing problem. Next I checked my 18-70mm f/3.5-4.5G lens at 50mm and 70mm, and that back focused as well. Then I tried my 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6G VR lens, but this seemed to work okay.

So I wasn't sure if the 18-70mm and 50mm lenses back focused or the D200 back focused and the 70-300mm lens front focused. I was in a bit of a pickle as I wanted the 50mm lens at least working for some photography I've got coming up in December.

Then I remembered that I had the Fuji IS-Pro, which is Nikon F mount. So I tried the 50mm and 18-70mm lenses on that, and they both auto-focused okay.

I did a google search to see if anyone else had trouble with the D200 back focusing, and found this thread: D200 back focus?, which had a few people complaining about back focus with their D200s. Thankfully, the thread also contains a link to a website with information on how to adjust the focus in the D200: My Camera needs adjusting. Can I do it myself?

Unfortunately, I couldn't get the allen key into the hole, so I gave up after a bit of trying. The position of the hole also means that you have to put the allen key very close to the sensor, and when you're trying to wiggle it to get it to lock into the hole, you could easily slip and damage the sensor. I might try again tomorrow though.

I went out on a walk about 3pm to try and get some sunset photos, but unfortunately the sun set behind a bank of cloud again, and so there was no sunset to be seen. The ground was mostly frozen, which made a nice change to the usual wet mud of the countryside paths at this time of year.

In the evening I watched an episode of Star Trek Deep Space 9 and an episode of VR Troopers with Mauser and Bo.

After that I added a description etc. to the pano I'd processed in the morning and then uploaded it to my website.

I also purchased 3 years of hosting from HostGator as they had a special 50% off Black Friday sale, making it $4/month instead of the normal $8/month for a 3 year plan.

Later in the evening I did a Japanese lesson with Mauser.

I received my print from Snap Mad today as well, it looks quite good other than a small blob of ink in the top left corner. I'll probably do a more detailed review and put it on my photo website blog.

Pano processing

This morning I processed a pano.

In the afternoon I did a bit more work on my photo website then went out around sunset, but the sunset wasn't visible.

In the evening I watched an episode of Star Trek DS9 with Mauser and Bo, an episode each of Magi Rangers and Zeo Rangers with L, and Autumn Watch with Clare and Brian.

I did a bit more website work, and processed a photo from Korea. Looking at the photos it looks like either my 50/1.4 lens or D200 has a back focusing problem. I'll have to try and do some tests tomorrow.

SEOing

This morning I updated my photo website with the files I modified yesterday, then checked it was all working okay.

I had a very weird problem where a page that I had updated was still loading the old version, even after refreshing the page. I downloaded the file from the server to check it had been updated, and it had. I then tried the page in Opera (previously I was using Google Chrome), and the updated page loaded okay.

So I started up Fiddler to check that Chrome was requesting the page from the server when I refreshed it, but now when I refreshed the page Chrome did request the page and did load the updated page. It's like Chrome was trying to annoy me by loading from cache but realised that I was watching it when I started up Fiddler and so decided to load the page from the server like it should.

After getting the site working okay I tried out the IIS SEO Toolkit on the local copy of my site. The first time I ran it, it downloaded 2 pages though. It seems that it doesn't work properly if you specify to consider links as internal from the main domain and subdomains.

It did find a quite a few true errors with my site, but mostly it found thousands of incorrect errors:
The description is missing (on 301s, 302s with Location, and 404s)
The <h1> tag is missing (on 301s, 302s with Location, and 404s)
The title is missing (on 301s, and 302s with Location)
The page contains multiple canonical formats (on one 301, 302s with Location, and 404s)
The page contains broken hyperlinks (on 301s, 302s with Location, links to )
An unexpected Error has occurred (on XML files larger than 100kB)
The link Text is not relevant (for links that contain a title attribute with relevant text)
The page contains too many hyperlinks (on the xml sitemap files!)

It is possible to filter results to show only pages with a 200 HTTP status code and without an <h1>, for example, but it would be more sensible if it already ignored things missing from pages that are automatically redirected.

In the evening I watched an episode of Star Trek DS9 with Mauser and Bo and did some online Christmas shopping.

Websiting

I spent most of today working on a javascript function that would take the list of page links and reduce them. So instead of having a list of 100 pages, you'd have something like:
1, 2, ... 25, 26, ... 99, 100

While I was at it I also namespaced most of my javascript objects. The problem with namespacing is that when first start writing javascript for a website you might only have 3 javascript objects, so adding them all to a single namespace seems pointless. But then when you've got about 20 objects, it makes much more sense.

But then of course, making the changes to those 20 objects and elsewhere to add them all to a single namespace is quite a bit of work. So I think whenever starting a new website, it is best to start by creating a single namespace everything else will go under, and avoid the work of having to do this later in the project.

In the evening I watched an episode of Deep Space 9 with Mauser and Bo. Apparently the writer René Echevarria had written what sounded like a reasonable script, but the bear called Stephen who works for the IRA was such a terrorist that he made the script be totally different and rubbish instead: Chrysalis DS9 episode on Star Trek wiki.

There was a quite good / maniacal bit where the genetically modified people were just singing a song for ages. Personally, I think it would have been better it they just kept singing for about half an hour. They would need to keep stopping about every minute or two for a few seconds so that you think they've finished, then carry on again.

After that I was doing some more work on my website, and found that a php variable wasn't available in my footer.php file in wordpress.

After quite a bit of debugging, I found the answer - I was including my file that declares the variable in the header.php file. Since this file is called by get_header(), any variables declared were local to the get_header function, and weren't available outside of that function.

So to fix this I had to declare the variables as global before I included the file that set the variables.

Like the header.php file, footer.php is included via a function - get_footer(). So again, you have to declare the variable(s) as global to be able to access the global variables instead of referring to local variables.

After doing that, I could now access the variables in the wordpress footer.php file okay.

Websiting

I spent most of today working on the ebay listings widget / advert for my pog website and correcting some errors in the site code.

In the afternoon I also tried contacting travelodge to see if they wanted to purchase any of my photos for decorating their new hotel with, or want a virtual tour done.

And I ordered a canvas print of one my photos from Snap Mad to see what the print quality is like.

In the evening I also did a Japanese lesson with Mauser and watched an episode of of DS9 with Mauser and Bo. It was about the main characters playing baseball and was directed by the legend that is Chip Chalmers. I'm not sure why Chip Chalmers is a legend though, I think it's probably just because his name is alliterative.

Poggin'

Most of today I was just cutting out pogs in Photoshop. It took so long because I had a load with notches cut into them, and so creating the mask for them was quite difficult.

I also watched an episode of Deep Space Nine with Mauser and Bo, and I watched the Jackie Chan Drunken Master film with them as well.

Watching a film and stuff

This morning I was testing to see if I could use window.location.replace() as a cross browser compatible alternative to history.replaceState(). According to the Mozilla Developer docs:

Replace the current document with the one at the provided URL. The difference from the assign() method is that after using replace() the current page will not be saved in session history, meaning the user won't be able to use the Back button to navigate to it.

I tested it out to try setting the hash like

window.location.replace(url+'#someHash');

and was glad to see that it didn't reload the whole page, but did set the hash.

After testing though, I found it didn't seem to be working properly. Then I realised I'd made a mistake in my code that made it redirect to a different version of the page. After correcting this, I was happy to find that it did work as advertised in most browsers.

In Opera I found that it didn't replace the history state, and so if you call window.location.replace() 100 times, you'll still need to press the back button 100 times to get back to the previous page. And Arora had the same problem as well. Firefox 3.5 on Ubuntu, Safari 5, Chrome 7, IE6, and IE8 (on Windows) all seemed to work properly though.

After lunch I watched most of an episode of Star Trek DS9 with Mauser and Bo.

In the morning Mauser had been saying about doing a trip round China / parts of Asia. So I decided to look at how much a micro four thirds setup would cost, as it looks like it would make for a good camera system when travelling (small and light).

I'm not too bothered by the size / weight of consumer lenses for 'normal' DSLRs, but mainly thought the small size of micro four thirds lenses would make it easy to keep them in one or two pockets. This should reduce the chance of them being pick pocketed compared to having keep 5 lenses in 5 different pockets.

However, it looks like micro four thirds are very expensive, e.g. comparing wide angle zooms for Micro Four Thirds, Nikon and Canon:
Panasonic Lumix 7–14mm f/4: £900
Nikon 16-35mm f4 G AF-S ED VR: £829.00
Canon 17-40mm f/4 L: £530

And comparing fisheyes:
Panasonic Lumix G Fisheye 8mm F3.5 £600
Tokina 10-17mm f/3.5-4.5 AT-X 107 DX Fisheye £410

Taking into account that I already own a few lenses for Nikon, buying the equivalent lenses for use with Micro Fout Thirds would make it very expensive.

After that I spent a while reading the PhotoShelter docs to see how I could integrate PhotoShelter with my existing website. Unfortunately it doesn't look like PhotoShelter can be integrated with an existing website, so I sent them a message to see if it is possible or not.

In the evening I watched another episode of Star Trek DS9 with Mauser and Bo, and also finished watching 'The Last Emperor' with them.

Google Map and Earthing

This morning I was getting my google map working in IE6. Then in the afternoon and evening I was trying to see if I could get google earth to zoom and pan while an info bubble is open without constantly resizing the info bubble.

Strangely, the info bubbles for items in the layers built in to Google Earth seem to work okay. But if I copied the html from one of those info bubble and pasted it as my info bubble, although my info bubble would look exactly the same as the bubble I'd copied from, my bubble would still do the annoying resizing thing!

I think I will give up and try filing a bug report.

I also watched an episode of Power Rangers Zeo with L and part of The Last Emperor with Mauser, Bo and Clare. The Last Emperor is quite annoying as the people speak a mixture of English and Chinese. I wish they had just done it in Chinese except for any bits that are meant to be in English.

Google Mapping, Record Recording, and Forest Gump on CDI watching

I spent most of this morning working on my google map, writing a function that would pan the map to move the info window into view, so that I could use it in IE7 where calling the info window's open method causes an error if the map is panning.

Unfortunately after getting the function working in Chrome, I found that it didn't work in IE7, and debugging it, it didn't look like there would be any (easy) way to make it work.

The problem was that I using the getContent method of the info window, and then using jquery to get the offset of the content's parent. But in IE7 it seemed like getContent returned a copy of the content node, rather than the actual node itself, and so getting the offset didn't work.

I spent most of the rest of the day testing in other browsers, and found webkit / Safari doesn't handle history.replaceState and window.location.hash properly. So I had to add some extra logic to make sure that history.replaceState is only used if the browser supports it and it works correctly. I also filed a bug report with webkit about this issue.

I also got my record player from the garage, set it up, and recorded a few records to my PC.

In the evening I also watched a bit of Forest Gump on the CDI with Diddlebury, and 2 episodes of Power Rangers Zeo.

Google Mapping

Today I was still doing Google Map and Earth stuff. I uploaded all the files to the webserver and posted on the google maps forum to try and get some help with a problem in IE7. I also reported a bug about disappearing markers in IE6 as it seemed to be a known problem, but it hadn't been reported as a bug yet.

Still to do is more extensive testing in IE8, IE9, Safari, Firefox3.5, Firefox4, Opera, Konqueror and K-Meleon.

In the evening I watched the "It's reeeeaaal" episode of Star Trek DS9 with Mauser and Bo

And I also watched some Robert W Paul films with Mauser.

Google Mapping

Today I was mainly still working on my Google Maps.

In the evening I also finished watching 'For All Mankind' with Mauser, Bo, and Clare.

Various stuff

This morning I was cutting out pogs in Photoshop and went to Church as usual.

In the afternoon I updated my pog website then accidentally deleted some files from my Ubuntu VM.

I went out to help someone with a computer problem for a few minutes, then came back home and restored my backup of the Ubuntu VM from this morning. While that copied over I read a bit of Moose Peterson's blog.

When the backup of the Ubuntu VM had finished copying over, I started it up and then re-copied all the pog images etc. I had previously copied to it since the last backup.

I then did some Google Earth work, but was having in trouble in that I had put the wrong URL for an image in my kml. I corrected the mistake and cleared the cache (both memory and disk), but Google Earth was still requesting the wrong URL for the image. I tried again, with closing Google Earth first, still the same. I tried logging out and choosing to delete the cache file, but it was still the same.

Eventually I tried changing the file name of the kml file that originally had the wrong URL in it, and updating the KML that requested the kml file with the file's new name. Hooray, it now worked. It seems that clearing the cache in Google Earth does not actually clear the cache.

Possibly clearing the cache only deletes items downloaded from Google's servers. If Google Earth downloads files from your website with long expires headers, it will cache them (as it should), but then there seems to be no way to clear this cache. I filed a 'feature suggestion' with Google that Google Earth should clear its cache when you clear the cache, as they don't seem to have a bug reporting mechanism.

In the evening I watched the first episode of Mahou sentai Magirenjâ, the first two episodes of VR Troopers, and an episode of Masked Rider with L. I also watched part of a film about Appollo 8 and the moon with Mauser, L, and Clare.

I did some more work on my google maps / earth as well.

Watching a film

This morning I was checking my emails and had an email from themutual.net offering an Alpine Watch from Home Shopping Selections for £10 + P&P, plus it was also buy one get one free. According the email, the RRP is £223, so you save £436! Great deal, right?

Well, Home Shopping Selections normally sells the watch for £15. Strangely, they also sell it for £2. And according to a poster on this thread, even free is too much:

they are cheap rubbish!

I have one that i got free, which was still too much!

As usual, you get what you pay for, and if it seems too good to be true it probably is.

In the afternoon and evening I watched Master & Commander: Far Side of the World and a DS9 episode with Mauser and Bo.

Google Map and Earthing

Yesterday (and also a few days ago) with my google maps work I was working on getting it working with unique urls as set out at http://ajaxpatterns.org/Unique_URLs (except I didn't bother implementing an iframe for <IE8 compatibility).

But then this morning, I was thinking that actually if you are using Google Maps, do you expect the back button to go back to the last interaction you made with the map (e.g. scrolling or opening an info window)? My thought is that no, you would expect the back button to go back to the previous page. By recording all interactions with the map in the url hash, if you made 100 interactions, you would then need to use the back button 100 times to get back to the previous page.

So I changed my code to not update the hash, then wondered if it was just me who thought this way about how the back button should work with Google Maps. So I did a google search, and found this post where the writer is complaining that you can't easily bookmark a google map. While he doesn't complain about lack of back button functionality in Google Maps, he does complain about it with another website.

So I posted to the sitepoint forums to see what other people thought.

I did some vacuuming and then spent quite a while doing KML stuff. I was trying to find out why my KML would load would it wouldn't fly to the loaded placemark and open the bubble for it. After quite a while of trying different things I eventually figured it out - I had used ;balloonFlyTo when it should be ;balloonFlyto. Doh!

I then tried to get multiple icons working in my KML but got stuck, so posted to the KML forums / google group to try and get some help.

I wrote some more of this blog post, then looked into whether it is possible to somehow delete the browser history for the page so that the URL could be updated without creating history states. This way bookmarking the current state of the map would be easy, while pressing the bck button would take you back to the previous page instead of back to the last interaction you made with the map.

I didn't think this would be possible, but it is - using history.replaceState(). It seems that currently this is only available in Chrome (maybe other webkit browsers as well), and the FF4 beta.

I downloaded the IE9 Platform preview, and was disappointed to see that this doesn't support it either. So I filed a feedback report in the vain hope they'll fix it. I would guess they'll wait until other browsers have been implementing it for a few years before they add it to IE though.

In the evening I was working on converting an image in DXO, ACR, and CNX2 to compare how well they handled CA correction of the Tokina fisheye. While I was doing this, I listened to a webinar with Dean Hunt and Phil Henderson. Dean introduced the webinar and said that he would hand over to Phil who would get straight into the 'meat', and wouldn't bore you with his life story.

But then, Phil spent ages talking about his life story, and how his life is so great now etc. etc. He was saying that he loved having the freedom to do what he wants and just go out trout fishing whenever he wants.

Then later he said that he was retiring as internet marketing was too much work and too tiring. He said that he would never promote or sell another 'make money' product after this one. And he said he only had 3 places on his new course. In fact, the course is so 'hush hush' and secret that you have to sign and NDA if you purchase one of the three places.

Then later he expanded the amount of places to 5. And later still Dean Hunt kept saying that Phil might open some more spaces in two weeks. Phil said that it might not be in two weeks, but did indicate that he would indeed be opening up more places in the future. So suddenly the course is not so exclusive as it was at the start of the webinar.

And regarding not selling any more 'make money' products in the future, I guess Phil must think that closing a course and then opening it again in the future doesn't constitute selling any more 'make money' products because it is the same product?

On the whole then, I wasn't impressed with his sales technique.

Another thing was that he said the course was a good few months 'ahead of the curve'. Now, I don't know exactly what the course was about, but Dean hinted strongly and Phil somewhat confirmed it was about Local search marketing. (Where you do internet marketing for local businesses). Local search marketing certainly isn't 'ahead of the curve', as I've seen quite a few people promoting it heavily already.

Photo processing and Google Mapping

This morning I was finishing off some photos, then I delivered them in the afternoon. For the rest of the afternoon and most of the evening I was working on the google maps page on my website.

In the evening I also watched an episode of Masked Rider and Kamen Rider with Bo and looked as Shaz's photos from South Africa.

AJAX url permalinking

This morning I was finishing adding metadata to the photos I took from my walk with McRad on Saturday, and then uploaded the photos to my photo website.

The rest of the day I was working on my google maps implementation, mainly adding unique urls / permalinks as per http://ajaxpatterns.org/Unique_URLs. I don't have back button functionality or any url change polling working at the moment though.

In the evening I also watched an episode of Masked Rider and Kamen Rider Black with Diddleberry.

Processing photos

Today I was just processing and adding metadata to the photos I took on my walk with McRad near Medbourne on Saturday. In the evening I also finished watching Lawrence of Arabia with Mauser and Bo.

Shaz came home for a few days today as well.

Okay weather

This morning there was a bit of blue sky, although a lot of the sky was covered in thin featureless white / grey cloud still. I thought that although the weather could be better, it might not get any better while the trees are still in autumn colour, so I went out to take some panos of Welland Park.

I also went out to Farndon Fields again and took a pano by one of the trees on the edge of a field.

When I got home I copied the photos to my PC and manually geo-coded them (I forgot to switch my GPS on again). I also uploaded some photos to my photo website.

While I was waiting I started watching RIP: A Remix Manifesto -


In the afternoon I finished watching the Remix Manifesto film. It started raining so I was glad I had gone out this morning.

After that I checked my email. Reading the Money Morning email, Dominic Frisby said

But with so many markets at such obvious turning points, and inflation very much the mot du jour, my short-term speculative money is betting on a rise in the dollar, if only in the short term, and a fall in everything else.

So I decided to take his advice, and sold my silver and precious metal ETFs, and put £1000 in a short yen long dollar ETF. But I kept my gold ETFs in case things go the other way to how Dominic thinks they might.

The rest of the afternoon and most of the evening I was working on a couple of panos that I took in the morning.

In the evening I also watched an episode of Masked Rider with L.

Processing photos

Today I was mostly just processing photos from Saturday.

In the late afternoon the weather was looking the same as it did yesterday afternoon when there was a nice sunset, so I decided to go out. Unfortunately the sunset today was rubbish.

In the evening I also watched the final episode of Chojin Sentai Jetman with L. It was quite weird for a final episode. I also watched an episode of Masked Rider with L, which was quite nonsensical (even more than usual).