Since moving this blog to intepid.com I have spent countless hours tweaking and testing and experimenting, but I have also learned some interesting new stuff in the process, so it’s not been a total waste. Some things I now know more than nothing about:

PHP

PHP is marvellous, and IMHO far more approachable than Perl. This may be partly due to its "curly brace" syntax, which is very familiar to a C/C++ programmer such as m’self. One of PHP’s greatest strengths is the ease with which you can mix data with code — you can write a webpage, a program, or anything in between.

PHP’s powerful image processing functions have me thinking of all sorts of fun tricks to do, like adding labels on the fly to images that are linked from other sites [ a common problem — it’s like people think it’s better to link to your image rather than copy it, whereas actually it’s the other way around, because if they copy it then at least they’re not stealing your bandwidth ] I haven’t actually enabled this feature yet, partly because I’m not sure what message I want to tag them with. Something simple perhaps, like "via intepid.com", or maybe "This asshole is stealing my bandwidth"

NB: I have no problem with people hot-linking to my images as long as they provide a link back to my site… It’s just really annoying when people casually link to my images to use as avatars in forums, or just to pretty up their homepages. This is why I’m thinking of the tagging option rather than blocking, so that I would at least get some "exposure" out of the deal. But seriously, it’s not a huge problem for me right now — I’m just looking for an excuse to try out my newly acquired PHP skillz…

mod_rewrite

Selective use of .htaccess files with mod_rewrite enabled is also a marvellous thing, allowing such wonders as restructuring or moving your web log on a whim, or selecting a page based on domain name, browser, etc. For example, I now have a new domain drivey.com which transparently maps to the contents of . I also use .htaccess to forcibly add or remove "www" prefixes [depending on preference], so as to avoid duplicate entries on search engines [eg visiting intepid.com will forward you to intepid.com].

It’s also remarkably easy to screw up when editing .htaccess, as I did many times, creating infinite forwarding loops, internal server errors, and bastardized URLs like https://intepid.com/http://www.jujusoft.com/log/

XML-RPC

Although I am currently using XML-RPC to upload entries to intepid, I don’t know that it is really the best way to go. In the future I am looking at the possibility of replacing it with the [old-fashioned, less trendy] HTTP POST method.

Part of the problem I’ve had with XML-RPC is that the relevant module [xmlrpc.php] was actually missing from the version of Wordpress that I started with [1.2.2] so I had to go get a version of the file from a previous version, which may not have been 100% compatible. I had to make a change to get it working properly, and even now I can’t use it to download posts without getting some kind of error in transmission.

Upgrading to a later version of the package [eg 1.5 beta], would probably clear up these problems, but simply working on this stuff [along with someone else’s comments I read recently*] has got me thinking that maybe XML-RPC is too often the complex solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. I mean, if a blog is already [necessarily] set up to update entries via POST and to deliver them using GET, what’s the point in adding XML-RPC to the mix?

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* Can’t find the article, but here are some other arguments for and against XML-RPC, which aren’t all that informative but give a vague idea of the issues involved.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 5th, 2005 at 7:30 pm and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.