On Monday I had 172 visitors, stomping the previous (year-to-date) record of 148.  Then on Tuesday I had 186.  I’d been wanting to re-add my daily visitors bar graph to the site, and having a surge in visitors helped convince me to do it last night.  You can see it at the bottom of the navigation section on the lefthand side of the page.

One reason for the increase in the visitor count is that previously, I didn’t have my visitor-logger on my photos pages.  I added it last week, and discovered that I was getting a few dozen hits per day from people searching for things like beefalo pictures, pistachio insect, and nice scenery, and those search-terms lead them directly to the photo-sets bypassing the main page and the visitor logger.  So it’s not actually a few dozen new visitors, it’s just that they weren’t being logged before.

In other news...

Google Maps is awesome.  It’s awesome because you can click and drag anywhere on the map itself to navigate -- the page never has to reload.  I think that mapquest and yahoo!maps will be switching to this format soon, as it’s just leaps and bounds better than their way of doing it (click, wait for page to load, find what you want, click again, wait again...).  It’s also awesome because it’s implemented entirely in JavaScript, which means it doesn’t require any yucky plugins like Java or Flash.  Finally, it’s awesome because it works in Moz/FF, and it doesn’t spike my computer’s CPU at 100% like many yucky-plugin-based webapps tend to do.

Update: AND, the size of the map-image on the screen isn’t fixed (and tiny) like Mapquest’s is.  If you put your browser into fullscreen mode (press the F11 key), the map is HUGE.  These are the best map features of all time, and yet they seem so obvious... I almost can’t believe no one has done this before.

And last but not least, why does "not at all" mean "not even a little"?

With the switch from PHP to SSI/Perl, and the modifications to my visitorlog that allow it to run without any manual maintenance for log-rotating, I can now deploy my website system (blogger, vlog, stats, and photo-scripts) on other sites with minimal hassle.

Kim has a new website at kimi.is.dreaming.org and my scripts are running there.  I did most of the script-setup work, while Kim did most of the design work, except for me pestering her to say "ew, I don’t like that color..." :)  What’s particularly cool is that the whole site is running from her laptop.  Anyway, she’s got scads of photos, and heck, I’m even in some of them, so go see (:

For the past 8 weeks or so, I’ve been slowly re-coding parts of my website to improve performance and fix a few bugs.  The work has been focused mainly on my visitor logger and my weblog script, with one big exception: I switched the entire site from PHP to pure SSI+Perl.  I switched mainly because SSI/Perl can do everything that I had been using PHP for, with the added bonus that SSI is built into Apache and Perl is installed on every Linux server already (and easily installable on Win32 systems), whereas PHP is often not installed by default and is somewhat of a pain to configure.  (At least compared to Perl, which requires no configuration whatsoever.)

If none of that means anything to you, you can still appreciate the results of the performance improvements and bugfixes.  The site loads much faster now, because the visitor logger now automatically rotates its logfiles and caches the site stats, so it’s not scanning through tens of thousands of lines of logfile every time a page is loaded.  (But don’t look at the rewritten stats page yet; the tables still need to be organized into a more presentable layout.)

On the bug-fixing tip, the blogger’s spell-checker now properly ignores any special tags (notably links) in posts, so the preview no longer barfs when trying to display them.  I also fixed a bug that truncated any posts that contained both an image and a double-quote character, but of course you’ve never noticed that bug since I don’t allow people to post images unless they are logged in with an admin account, and only I have such an account around here :)  (Well, the blogger on the photos pages allows image-posting even for not-logged-in users.)

I also fixed the bug whereby if you entered a name into the site that contained spaces, the spaces would be displayed in their encoded form, as ’%20’ instead of ’ ’.  The fix was trivial, notwithstanding allegations that I had been "making excuses" for it, ostensibly because I didn’t feel like fixing it.  In the process, I also discovered an off-by-one bug in Apache, which will be fixed in the next release of that program.

In other news, my trusty old (OK, maybe just "old") 233mmx system recently decided to start booting again, so I’ll now start to debug the strange disappearing-text bug that some people have reported when using IE.

It’s not that I want to keep posting these all the time, but they just keep pouring in... I’m #2 for:

Chief Elements of Krispy Kreme’s Strategy

Now THAT one I’m proud of  ( :

And interestingly, Belmont Club is #3, which is another blog that I frequent.

Go to this Launchcast support page and click on the "No" button, then type them a nice message like this:

This has to be some kind of joke, right?  Your software fails to work on all but 2 browsers on 2 operating systems?  So... your software doesn’t work at all for Linux users, it only works for Mac users if you use a browser that’s 3 years old, and it only works for Windows users if you use the most insecure program ever written as your web-browser.  Mozilla/Firefox is the most standards-compliant browser there is, it’s architecture is entirely open, and it runs on virtually every OS in existence; it can’t possibly be that hard to make Launchcast work with it...

As you may have noticed, I am immensely entertained by the Google queries I find in my website’s referrer logs.  Barring the technical stuff, the things people are searching for are rarely found on my site, but sometimes they are.  I recently discovered that I am #5 for mcconnells mill photos and #13 #2 for just mcconnells mill, because of these photos.  Given that McConnells Mill is a really nice and big state park, that’s (apparently) pretty well-known around Pittsburgh, it’s kind of amazing that I’m #13 #2 overall for just the name itself.

I’m #2 for knee deep in nietzsche’s lies which is pretty cool.

Then I’m #8 for why does my screen blink whenever I click on something.  Come on people, it’s Google, not a magic 8-ball.  Generally speaking, treating Google like a librarian is not a good way to find what you’re looking for.  It’s not a person.  You need to put a few seconds of thought into your search efforts.

You have to remember that Google is just taking the words you enter and finding webpages that contain those words.  It’s not looking for "answers" to your input.  The state of search at this point in time just isn’t that intelligent, so your goal is to think of what terms would appear on a page that discusses your problem.  And the real secret to searching effectively is using phrases instead of individual words whenever possible.  The other day when someone found my site by searching for nonsense poems about moldy bread, they didn’t find what they were looking for.  Based on his query we can assume he wasn’t interested in nonsense poems about just any bread; it had to be moldy bread.  But that isn’t what he asked Google to find; he asked Google for all pages containing all of those words, even if "moldy" and "bread" appeared in completely different places on the page, as they do on mine.  What he should have done is put quotes around the phrase "moldy bread" in his search, because that tells Google that the pages must contain that exact phrase, not just the two separate terms independent of each other.

Of course, Google is programmed to try to figure out what you might have meant, in a crude sort of way, and will sometimes assume that if you have two words in a row, you might have wanted them to be a phrase, even though you failed to use quotes.  So you’ll probably see that the first results do indeed have either "nonsense poems" or "moldy bread" as phrases.  But again, search just isn’t that smart yet, so my site -- which contains neither of the phrases "nonsense poems" or "moldy bread" -- was still #10.  (Well, now I’m #2, but only because I now have a post containing that exact sequence of words.)

But back to the fun stuff: I’m #1 for when is googlebot coming.  (And he is, you know.)  (Coming.)  (For you.)  (Soon.)

I am #10 on Google for:

nonsense poems about moldy bread

My life is now complete.

Not only is the site hideous, not only is it apparently written by a 22-going-on-13-year-old who just learned the F-word, not only is it infested with those irritating look-how-cool-I-am posed self-portraits, but the person is embedding a Reggie track from MY server as the background-sound for her little website.  Not downloading the song and then uploading it to her myspace account, mind you -- heaven forbid she should actually do any WORK or use any of her OWN bandwidth for her background sounds -- oh no, she is PLAYING THE SONG FROM MY SERVER DIRECTLY.

Did I mention that I propose a mandatory test for any person wishing to publish anything, anywhere, on the internet?  Oh yes, I do.  I propose this test: if you are not an ignorant jerk, then you are allowed to put things on the internet.  If you are an ignorant jerk, then instead of being allowed to post things on the internet, you get a kick in the face.

I think that’s reasonable.

When you want to visit a website, you type its address into a web browser and press the Enter key.  OK, so you knew that.  But less well-known is the fact that for nearly every website, you don’t need to type the "www" at the front of a site’s address.  (And of course, you never need to type the http:// because your web-browser will add that automatically.)

Whether the www-rule is true depends on how the owner of a given website has configured the server.  But for nearly all websites, "www.foo.com" is just a shortcut to "foo.com" or vice-versa; either way, there is only one website there, it’s just got two addresses.

For example, visit hp.com.  If you look quickly, you’ll notice that the address you just typed has been automatically changed to www.hp.com.  The same is true for microsoft.com.  My website, on the other hand, automatically changes www.nodivisions.com to just nodivisions.com.  Then some sites like dell.com don’t do any auto-redirection like that; both dell.com and www.dell.com are allowed by the server.  In all these cases, each site has only one set of webpages; the pages just happen to be accessible through two different addresses, foo.com and www.foo.com.

I’d like to wish a warm welcome to all my visitors looking for:

my lcd has 1 red dot how do i get rid of it

From Google’s 2004 Year-End Zeitgeist:

When more people are interested in a "wardrobe malfunction" at a superbowl than the Democratic presidential candidate, I think it’s safe to say the dems are at least a little out of touch with the American people.