My site may disappear briefly sometime in the next week.  Or it may not.  I thought it would be gone already apparently not.  I’m switching registrars to GoDaddy, since it costs less than half what my hosting provider charges.  But rather than saving that extra eight dollars, I spent seven of them to buy vacantnebula.com (that’s without the hyphen), which redirects here.  The main point of this is to make it easier for me to tell people my URL, and subsequently to help people who forgot about that hyphen.  The phrases “vacant hyphen nebula dot com” and “vacant nebula dot com, with a hyphen between vacant and nebula” seem to confuse people.

I have made a few small changes to the site lately.  First off, I got rid of the “Home” page; the blog is now the default page when you come to my site.  Secondly, I replaced the “Contact” page with an “About” page, where I plan to put more information that could be useful to a new visitor to my site (not that I expect many of those).

But the big thing, that I just finished, is the triumphant return of the music page.  For over a year the page has said “I really do plan on putting something here someday.”  Well that day is today!  I found a Flash mp3 player, so that you won’t have to download the tracks to play them, since you probably don’t feel like doing that anyway.  I still need to do some work on the page—hey, did you guys know some scientists in a bunker in New Mexico invented something called CSS that can totally help your webpages look nicer??  I need to hit up some of that on my music page!  Also, none of the text there has been spell-checked, I’d prefer that you let me know privately if you find any mistakes or anything (as opposed to, let’s say, putting all my typos in the comments).  Lastly, look for the lost lyrics to “Why Me?”  Anthropologists have been searching for them for years, but they never looked in my brain.  I just did.

why me why always me

Due to recent increases in spam comments, you will now get a “captcha” confirmation page if you submit a comment that has any links in it.  So if you’re blind or otherwise using a screen reader: sorry, you cannot post links on my comments page at this time.  I thought about doing a challenge-response thing (where there would be a question like “enter the name of that red fruit that starts with A”), but I decided this would be easier (for me anyway). Update: Now the title and alt attributes of the image are a question whose answer is the word given.  Not that I know of any blind people using my site, but if there are now they can leave comments too.

I came up with a list of about 50 words (mostly names of fruits, animals, musical instruments, video game characters, and songs), put them in Photoshop and screwed around with the Liquefy tool, and added some random lines through them.  I think they are all still quite legible.

I’ve tested it a good bit, but as always, let me know if you have any problems submitting comments.

Just wanted to make an update to my previous post:  I now have a layouts page, where you can pick the layout you want to view the site in.  I mean it’s no CSS Zen Garden, but I think I have a nice little infrastructure set up and it should be really easy for me to experiment with new layouts without throwing away the old ones.

If anyone out there is really bored, feel free to make a new layout for the site.  Not that I actually expect anyone to actually do that... but if you do and it looks decent, I’ll put it up..

Just under one year ago I brought you an all-new design for this site.  If you preferred the old layout, or if you never saw it, now’s your chance to go back.  Just slap “?1point0” onto the end of just about any URL on my site.  There is now a better way to do this.

A few notes:

• 1point0 layout option is not persistent.  So clicking on any link in a 1point0 page will return to default layout.  This is something I will probably fix some day.
  Fixed

• Text-only layout takes precedence.  So if you are viewing a page in text-only layout, you will need to click that “view full graphics” link down at the bottom of the page before going into 1point0 view.
  Fixed

• As you might expect, there are a few rendering problems in Internet Explorer.  Nothing that makes the site unusable, but if you’re still using Internet Explorer you should really consider a better alternative anyway.

• I actually improved upon the original design, using only one table for layout purposes.  I’m sorry but the CSS trickery required to do equal-height columns that look right on all browsers is less intuitive and consistent than a table with two cells.  Sue me.

• It all validates, except that I need to replace strike tags with del tags.  I’ll save that for another day.
  Done

Note:  I have improved this in many ways.  See my next post for details.

I’m takin ya back to the old school cause I’m an old fool who’s so cool

I have a couple of unrelated topics to discuss today...

I’ve made several little updates to my website lately, most of which I have mentioned on the homepage.  Most recently I’ve given the photos page a new feature, where each directory now has a thumbnail, made up of four photos beneath it.  I’m still not totally pleased with the way it looks, and part of the problem is the dark background.  I got the inspiration from this article, which produces some impressive results.  Only problem with that method is that the height of the thumbnails will depend on the images involved, and I wanted them to be all the same size.  I may just get over that, or write some code to crop the images.  I’ve also encountered a problem where PHP crashes if I try to generate too many images at once.  I think I know what the problem is, and in C++ I’d just use a pointer and be done with it, but I don’t know that PHP has those.

Firefox has been crashing a lot for me since the last patch, usually when I load several pages with Flash ads.  Penny Arcade and Joystiq in particular would consistently crash Firefox.  Has anyone else had this problem?  It doesn’t seem to happen for me at home, but happens a lot at work.  The only two differences between home and work are: 1) I leave my Firefox session open for about a week at a time, so that it will remain the first icon on my taskbar and so that I won’t have to reenter a bunch of passwords; and 2) I am going through a proxy server at work.  I tried updating my flash player but that didn’t do anything.  I did find an extension called Flashblock, which (you’d never guess this from the name) blocks flash content.  Since I’ve used it I haven’t had any problems.  I’d recommend it even if you’re not having problems.

One last question—does anyone have any recommendations for video editing/DVD making in Windows?  I’d like to be able to create simple menus, just a jpeg in the background and a list of video clips to jump to.  Nothing fancy really.  I have just never gotten around to transferring our videos from the wedding and Hawaii to DVD, since my old PC just didn’t have the power to do it.  I’ve used Adobe Premiere before, but I wasn’t very impressed by it.  Any other suggestions?

Well I’ve been doing this updates-every-Monday-and-Thursday thing for nearly two months now, and traffic to my site seems to have actually slowed down.  Of course I’m judging traffic by number of comments, so this could also have to do with the most frequent commenter being pretty busy lately.  There are still a lot of lurkers, because when I was at the beach for a week, traffic (as in, page views and bytes transferred) did not decrease by as much as I had expected (i.e., I do not account for the majority of page views on my own site).

So are two posts a week too much?  Should I just go back to posting whenever I feel like it?  I’m thinking I’ll keep posting on Mondays, but only post on Thursdays when I have something worth saying.  And of course I’ll omit my post on the occasion that Stephanie posts something beforehand.

My site now uses URL Rewriting.  It was surprisingly simple to set up.  I found this overview covered all the basics, and a few Google queries gave me this useful cheat sheet that covered pretty much everything else I needed.  Both of them are kind of aimed at people who don’t know how to use regular expressions, but I do know how to use them so I can’t vouch for how well they explain them.

Any old links you have to my site should work (for now), but you may want to update them.  In particular, the RSS feeds have changed:

Kip’s feed:  http://www.vacant-nebula.com/rss/kip/
Stephanie’s feed:  http://www.vacant-nebula.com/rss/stephanie/
Both:  http://www.vacant-nebula.com/rss/

Like I said, the old URL will work for a while, but I’m not making any promises for what will happen two months from now.

Starting today, I’m planning on making my blog posts at regular intervals.  The plan right now is to make posts on Mondays and Thursdays.  If this ends up being too much, I may occasionally drop Thursdays.  I guess we’ll see what happens.

Over the weekend I had some free time so I wrote up some code to give me a lot of statistics about my site.  Think of this as Google Zeitgeist, only not as interesting, fun, or cool.  Here are some of my findings:

• Posts made on Monday receive the most comments.  Tuesday was a close second.  So I decided Monday would be a good day to begin making posts regularly.  As I suspected, weekend posts averaged significantly fewer comments (just one per post).  Note: does not include posts made before the comments feature was added to the site.

• 94% of comments are made within three days of the post.  So making a post on Thursday shouldn’t steal the thunder from the Monday post.  Also notice that over half of comments made (53%) are made within the first 24 hours.

• Most of you are reading my blog at work.  It’s okay, I won’t tell your boss.  90% of comments are made Monday-Friday, and 71% of comments are made from 8:00am to 5:00pm.  Look at the hour-of-day stats: isn’t that about as close to a Gaussian distribution as you can hope to get for such a small data set??

• I haven’t had much of a pattern in making posts.  Sunday is the only day when I make significantly fewer posts than any other day.  I also tend to make a lot of posts just before bed (..and also a lot at work..).  :)

• Kip’s mean time between posts is 5.47 days, or 1.28 posts per week.  Sorry, no graphs for that.

• Stephanie’s mean time between posts is 16.70 days, or 0.42 posts per week.

Some notes on the data:

• All statistics include posts made by both myself and Stephanie.

• Comments that I made to my own posts were disregarded.

• Data size for all posts:  n = 111

• Data size for posts since comments feature was added:  n = 32

• Data size for all comments (excluding my own comments):  n = 82

• Statistics were collected 2006.05.13, around 2:00 PM.

If you have some kind of statistics fetish, or if you want to independently verify my findings, or if you just have a lot of free time on your hands, you can view the raw data here.  It’s formatted (tab-delimited) to be pasted in Excel, not to look pretty.

Over the weekend I put in some code to filter out comment spam on my blog.  Most of it is Garrison’s code that has proven to be 100% effective on his site.  I also added in a few heuristics of my own design.  If you make a comment that it thinks is spam, it won’t be lost, but I’ll have to approve it.  But that shouldn’t happen unless you include a lot of links (most of the checks are on referrer and user agent).

I’m not sure why someone is going out of their way to invest their advertising efforts on the five people who regularly read my blog.  I guess you guys are really cool or something.