Nicolas Demers – Page 35 – Web, photos and assorted geekery

Last month’s photos

I’ve just posted a little medley of pictures I took over the month of January. Enjoy!

File sorta not found

Well, the site itself works just fine, but it looks like there were a few issues left to deal with.

First, Wordpress wasn’t returning the right status code (404) when a requested page couldn’t be found. That was easily fixed. Returning the correct HTTP status is not too important for human browsers but is a huge deal for search engines because when you’re indexing the Web you need to know which pages actually exist.

Well, the site itself works just fine, but it looks like there were a few issues left to deal with.

First, WordPress wasn’t returning the right status code (404) when a requested page couldn’t be found. That was easily fixed. Returning the correct HTTP status is not too important for human browsers but is a huge deal for search engines because when you’re indexing the Web you need to know which pages actually exist.

The status code was only part of the problem, though. See, what WordPress does when you use custom URL rewrites (as I do) is, if the requested URL doesn’t map to an existing file, the request is redirected to a custom error page. The annoying side effect is that as far as the server is concerned, a file was delivered correctly and no error is logged. Which messes up my stats. Fortunately, there’s a solution: a WP plugin called Redirection. It handles 30* redirections as well as keeping a log of 404 errors. The former isn’t necessary for now, since only gallery & photo URI’s have changed—and I have to use .htaccess to handle those, since they’re outside WordPress, but the latter is a godsend. Not a perfect solution, since in a perfect world I shouldn’t even have to use workarounds, but I’m very happy with it.

Oh, and AWStats (the stats package I’m using) was counting each browsed page twice. Seems a gallery page (.php, which is counted as a page view and not just a hit) is called in the background to build the photo grid displayed in the sidebar. Fortunately AWStats allows you to ignore certain pages, and this won’t be a problem in the future.

Curtain Up!

Well, hey, that was pretty painless. I was worried about having to move my Wordpress installation from one directory to another, but it went off very smoothly. Of course, then I had to do a bit of cleaning up, re-upload my images, and so on.

So here we are. 6+ months of work, on and off at times, have finally paid off.

Well, hey, that was pretty painless. I was worried about having to move my WordPress installation from one directory to another, but it went very smoothly. Of course, then I had to do a bit of cleaning up, re-upload my images, and so on.

So here we are. 6+ months of work, on and off at times, have finally paid off. I have harnessed the powers of WordPress and Gallery (and the synergistic power of WPG2) and come up with… well, something that’s pretty darn good, if I do say so myself. I mean, I could go the humble route and be all, “Oh, I still have a lot to learn”, which was actually my first reflex. And which goes without saying. But, comments! And a rich blogging interface! And Lightbox overlays!

I’m still going through the posts and pages, and testing internal links. URIs for posts (except the pre-2003 ones) haven’t changed, but those for photos have. Unfortunately, though Gallery does provide some URI rewriting ability it’s not nearly as versatile as I would’ve liked. Grumble, grumble.

Anyway. Enough about me. Enjoy the new site!

Firebug is the bestest tool evar!!!

I’d installed Firebug for JavaScript debugging, as part of an online Ajax course I’m taking. At first that’s all I used it for, and only for that course’s homework, because I don’t use any JavaScript for my site.

But as I wrap up the new design for my site, I’ve been using the HTML/CSS inspector function more and more. I’m easily able to see all the nested elements, their precise layout (with margins and paddings), as well as the styles applied to them. It takes all the guesswork out of Web design (okay, not all. This being a Firefox plugin, it’ll only show you how a site looks in Firefox). No more futzing around with coloured backgrounds or borders to test layouts!

If I had to find one fault, it’s that the HTML inspector is too tolerant of invalid code. Now that I’m at the stage of validating the XHTML, I’m finding a number of errors—such as incorrectly nested div’s—that (IMO) should have been caught by Firebug. But, oh well. No one tool can do everything.

First post!

…of the year, that is.

Okay, it’s been almost a month. What have I been up to, you ask?

…of the year, that is.

Okay, it’s been almost a month. What have I been up to, you ask?

Well, I spent 10 days in Ottawa and Montreal, visiting family. I saw Mamma Mia! at the National Arts Centre, which was awesome. Yeah, it was a pretty threadbare plot, little more than an excuse to string together two dozen ABBA songs, but that’s exactly what I signed up for, so that’s all right. I visited my brother for New Year’s, as per tradition. I was actually there for a couple of days, and had the chance to explore the city a bit. With a borrowed Metro pass (thanks, Laurie!) I first swung by Île-Sainte-Hélène, then wandered around downtown snapping pictures of churches and interesting buildings. Unfortunately, this being New Year’s Eve, a lot of places were closed. Now I won’t get to see if the Museum of Contemporary Art would have been worth the detour. Boo. On the bright side, I learned something about French-Canadian martyrs.

Oh, and I finished Les Misérables. Yeah, it only took me… what, nine months? But it was worth the effort. To be honest, I’m still in the process of digesting it. I think what I loved best about it was how it made history come alive. All I remember from studying the early 19th century in school is a bunch of dates: Napoleon, Waterloo, Louis XVIII, Charles X, this Republic, that Empire… but Hugo gives context and depth to those numbers, by going on about slang, fashion, popular culture, local history and various fascinating trivia that ties everything together. Les Misérables is the story of Paris as much as that of Jean Valjean, Cosette, Javert and Thénardier. More so, maybe; they’re the lens through which the reader experiences the revolutions and wars and proto-socialism and all the other crazy, exciting events of the era. In fact, they may be no more than symbols of different aspects of French society; the misérable who found a way out, did good, and died well (Valjean); the misérable who was irredeemably bad, kept abusing his fellow human beings in spite of numerous chances to mend his ways, and ended up settling in America to become a slave trader (Thénardier); the incarnation of Law, harsh and absolute, who couldn’t go on when faced with the truth that shades of grey existed.

Yeah. Still digesting.

And it’s a brand new year, with a brand new job. Yes, I was laid off last November. (Which, now that I think about it: it is just me, or are people more likely to be laid off after long weekends? Because I was laid off just after Remembrance Day. The time before that, after Labour Day. And before that, Thanksgiving.) And this new job is Web development, which is something I’ve been wanting to get into for a while.

2008 should be interesting. I’ve… had a lot of stuff happen to me in the last couple of years, a lot of it painful, most of it growthful. Haven’t blogged about it, ain’t gonna. But the point is, though I’m still in a period of transition, I feel that I’ve reached a turning point, and my life is finally on track. Yes, 2008 should definitely be an interesting year.

I’m leavin’ on a jet plane

iPod charged? Check. Seriously West Coast downloaded? Check. Camera charged? Check. Cell phone charged? Check. Chargers for all aforementioned gadgets? Check. Ticket confirmation? Check. Yep, it’s time to fly out to Ottawa to reconnect with the family.

Gotta swing by the library to renew Les Misérables. Maybe at my parents’ place I’ll have the time to finish the fucking thing. Nah, I’m just kidding, it’s really an awesome book. Just… challenging. And long.

Heh. I’m even looking forward to the flight. Haven’t been on a plane in two years and after the last horrendous experience you’d think I’d avoid them like the plague. But (a) what choice do I have? (b) ehh, that’s in the past. Today’s a brand new day.

The Search For…

So… I’ve got two options here, neither of them totally satisfactory.

1) Use the built-in Wordpress search function. It’s pretty basic, though you can install plugins to make it search pages as well as posts, and nicely highlight search terms on the results page. Pro: it only searches post/page content, and title (this annoyed me before). Which in fact is a bit of a con, because now I may want to search the comments.

So… I’ve got two options here, neither of them totally satisfactory.

1) Use the built-in WordPress search function. It’s pretty basic, though you can install plugins to make it search pages as well as posts, and nicely highlight search terms on the results page. Pro: it only searches post/page content, and title (this annoyed me before). Which in fact is a bit of a con, because now I may want to search the comments. Other con: the search results are displayed in chronological order (timestamp for posts, creation date for pages). No clever algorithms to determine usefulness, even if it’s only giving a higher ranking to search terms in titles.

Other huge con: it won’t search the photo galleries. That runs off a completely different database, and while Gallery does have a search plugin, I think it’d look silly to use two different forms, each searching half my site. Not to mention, I don’t even know where I’d place them.

So it looks like we’re going with (2), a Google-powered search. The same as what I’ve got now? Not quite. I’ve registered a custom search engine which should do pretty well. It’s nothing fancy, but it will allow me to style the results page to a degree. There’ll be ads, but I can live with that. And it’ll make my job a lot easier, since I don’t have to worry about formatting the output of two different search engines.

What don’t I need?

I’m still working on the new site design. It’s slow. And frustrating. I want to do more than just giving my site a face lift, but honestly it’s damn hard to be creative when I’m still learning the tools. So I experiment. And I play. I add stuff. And I subtract.

Subtracting’s important. There comes a point when pretty styles and frills are just too distracting, too showing, too hard to maintain, too much.

Subtracting’s important. There comes a point when pretty styles and frills are just too distracting, too showing, too hard to maintain, too much. It’s not just styles, either. Just recently I decided to scrap the login functions provided by WordPress. There are other ways to control comment spam (such as, hah, nobody reading my blog), and the “login/register” links were just… blocking me. Which I didn’t even realise until I removed them from the sidebar, and then everything fell into place. Visitors will get cookies to remember their info, so they only have to fill it in once.

And then there’s quotes. Do I want quotes in this upcoming version? If so, how? On big long pages, the way they are now? But do I want to put them in separate pages? It feels… untidy, somehow. I was never totally happy with the structure of the “Inspiration” section in the present version, though maybe it’s the asymmetry of it: one page of links vs. 3 pages of quotes. So what’s the solution? Are cool quotes to be nonessentials? Maybe I put a random one in the sidebar or footer, like Slashdot does (and like I’m doing for my blogroll)? Or prune them and keep them around in a separate page? I dunno. I like them, and I like that they bring some search engine traffic in, but I’m not convinced they fit with the rest of the site.

I’m cultured, y’all

Last Friday I went to the Eastside Culture Crawl. And I haven’t blogged about it not because I didn’t enjoy it or it didn’t make an impression me, but because I just didn’t know what to say. It’s… art. I don’t know much about art. Like the saying goes, “Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.” And I feel the same applies here. Still, let’s give it a go.

For starters, it really wasn’t what I expected. I’d imagined big art galleries and showrooms, but the two studios I visited (the Mergatroid Building and Parker Street Studios) were very utilitarian warehousey buildings each housing many independent little studios. Which I should have known just from looking at the Web site, but there you go. And you know what? It was a lot better that way. It brought the exhibits down to a more human scale; looking around the small studios, I could see half-finished work (especially in furniture shops) and the tools of the trade. They felt like very productive spaces, and I could easily imagine the creative process going on.

Mind you, it didn’t bring the artwork’s prices down to a human scale, but hey; artists gotta eat too. I won’t go the “Why pay $1.8M for three coloured stripes?” route.

Crowds were fierce, and didn’t let up even when we left shortly before the exhibition was supposed to close. Not bad for studios set square in the middle of an industrial park, where parking was definitely not easy to find.

At first I took photos of the studios (including the studio names) but quickly stopped. I’d tried that before, when I went whale watching in Tofino and it just didn’t go anywhere. So instead of taking photos, I got up close and personal with a lot of the art. It was purely unconscious; didn’t even notice I was doing it until it was pointed out to me, which is even more interesting since I never thought of myself as a very tactile person. But there I was feeling and running my hands over the smooth ceramics, warm carved woods, cool plastics and cold metals. (Not the paintings hanging on the walls, of course. That’d be silly.) Neat. I’ve never tried building anything with my hands except IKEA™ furniture, but now I can totally see the appeal.

Enlightenment For Sale

Sunday was quite a full day of volleyball. A reffing clinic around noon, then dropping in to Intermediate 1 (I figured I’d have a good shot, since lots of people would be away for the long weekend), then my usual Intermediate 2 play. There was also a beginner reffing clinic between I1 and I2; I’d already taken it, so it gave me a chance to go grab a bite to eat.

I went to that little muffin/snack place, corner of Alma and 4^th Ave, realised I didn’t have enough cash, and went looking for a bank machine. On an impulse, even though it was dark and drizzling, I decided to wander up 4^th and after a block or two came upon Banyen Books. Wow. Now there’s a name that was totally not on my mind. I’d only been there once or twice probably ten years ago, when I was still in my kinda-paganish phase. To buy a copy of the Tao Te Ching, if I recall. Wait, no, it was to buy a copy of The Complete Book of Tai Chi Chuan, as recommended by my then-teacher, and I bought the TTC on my own because Taoism appealed to me. Ah, memories! So, I couldn’t resist: since I still had some time to kill, I went in to browse.

It was just as I remembered it. I’m pretty sure it used to be in another location, so the layout was probably different, not that that mattered much. And I remember they used to have one of those little fountains, the kind that always makes me want to pee, but didn’t this weekend, thank gawd. But everything else? Exactly. The. Same. Incense, soft music, the promise of magic and revelation in every Tarot deck and $50 crystal. I wandered the shelves of books on dream analysis and cosmic science and Celtic Goddess worship and all sorts of weird esoteric topics I’d never even heard of. So many fluffy morsels for people who’ll believe anything that feels good, people hungrily seeking something they can’t even name and wouldn’t recognize if they found it.

Truth is, I could feel faint echoes of the same yearnings inside me. There was a time when I too was a seeker, sort of. After dropping Catholicism, I looked for answers or at least wisdom in mythologies both old and new to replace beliefs that hadn’t appealed to me in a long time. I didn’t put much effort into it because I never felt that the spiritualities I absorbed were really what I needed. Nowadays, of course, I tend to trust my own judgment and revel in my skepticism. I don’t need faiths, spiritualities to make me complete or hand me The Truth.

Still, I have… moments of weakness. Now, in one corner of the store (next to handsome leatherbound Books of Shadows) were a few racks of sketchpads and notepads, all with very pretty covers. I was seriously tempted to get one. I hadn’t done any drawing in a long time, and I thought it might inspire me. Or at least push me to practice regularly, cos Gawd knows I need the practice. But really, wasn’t that more magical thinking? If they’re anywhere, the talent and the potential are in myself. Not some object I shelled out $24.95 + tax for, no matter how pretty it is.

So I left without getting anything, and went back to the gym to sweat off half my body weight. On the way home I bought a pad of unlined paper at Safeway for a couple of bucks, on which I’ve been doodling since.