Google Docs Blog Posting to MovableType

Nullstream Site

John claims that he'll do more blog posts if I hook up blog publishing from Google Docs. So here it is. This post is published from a Google text editing document. It definitely makes text entry easier, but some of the features like the post title(!), categories and extended entries don't work, requiring us to still do minor editing back in MovableType. Still, the ability to re-edit posts with the rich text features and inline images may well make posting easier. Let's see how this goes. This counts as my post - John and Paul, you guys owe us a brilliant, witty post from Google Docs. Now back to my Pokemans.

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Blogroll

Nullstream Site

Ok peeps, it's time to check out the blogroll on the left menu over there. I'm in the Virgin Islands for the next couple weeks "goin' mobile". I'll be posting about the trip on both CaribbIan and my travelblog. I'll also try to get my act together and start updating the photoblog here as well. I have tons of photos cached up and just waiting to be posted.

So far, I took this picture of a local guy with some homemade rum and medicinal herb tonic. :-)

Comments (1)

J, June 25, 2007 03:32 PM:

Bump... Check out this blog for updates on my Caribbean trip.

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Nullstream Mobile

Nullstream Site

I've also completed the work on the Nullstream Mobile site, located at www.nullstream.com/mobile (or mobile.nullstream.com if you prefer). It uses only basic HTML, conserves bandwidth and works great on the most minimal browsers. You can view the most recent posts, the most recently commented on posts and the entire monthly post archives.

Individual posts are formatted for the small screen, and even support the new captcha features. There individual post pages also let you easily navigate between entries with links on the top and bottom of the page, as well as buttons that let you skip right to comments, comment entry, or back to the top of the page.

Let me know if you see any issues on your phone!

Comments (2)

J, April 24, 2007 10:10 PM:

Yes, I meant to have the ridiculously repeating badge. If you want to make your own badge, check out this online badge creation tool.

Ian, April 28, 2007 03:13 AM:

Posting on my PSP. Looks good!

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Captchas

Nullstream Site

In another round of spam fighting, I've implemented a captcha system. This means that in order to enter a comment, you'll need to type the word that appears in the image next to the comment box. This is retroactive to commenting on all past posts as well, so get used to it.

Captchas aren't always images containing words that are hard for computers to decode. They're any system that tries to provide an easy solution for humans, and a difficult one for machines. Witness Hotcaptcha:

I've also implemented an internal change that will highlight the comments made by authenticated nullstream authors. This change is not retroactive, but new comments made will include the feature, as seen below.

Comments (2)

Paul, April 24, 2007 09:38 PM:

First (authenticated) post!

Paul, April 24, 2007 09:41 PM:

Dum, de dum... just pretending to be Paul.

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Nullstream Photoblog

Nullstream Site

Announcing Nullstream Photoblog. I've put together a dedicated photoblog for my photos under http://www.nullstream.com/photoblog. The old photoblog posts are still available under the Photoblog category archive. This new format is much more typical photoblog style and will help allay grave concerns that this site should ever turn away from brilliant technical commentary. :-)

The new photoblog has its own RSS Feed. So you can subscribe to new photos independantly of weblog posts. You can also use this feed URL in Google Sidebar to pull photos from.

One of the "funnest" things for me in creating the new photoblog layout is the inclusion of Google Map APIs. The location each photo is taken is represented as a pushpin on the world map that you can click on for more information, zoom in, satellite view, etc. I've got a few more ideas as well...

I hope you enjoy the photoblog, I'll try to keep it updated quite often - so please subscribe to the RSS feed. I've a huge archive of photos over the last 6 months that should keep the pipeline full. I'm interested in feedback on what types of shots people like to help improve my photography, so make use of the comments area on each photo. You can also contact me if you're interested full size images for desktop backgrounds.

Comments (4)

John, April 12, 2006 09:16 PM:

Very nice.

GW, April 12, 2006 09:31 PM:

Unless it's just me.....it doesn't seem to be working quite right anymore.

J, April 12, 2006 11:11 PM:

Thanks, I was adding EXIF data to the posts but forgot a tag somewhere. It's fixed now. If you look at the RSS feed, it has the original image data now with the camera settings and all that. Haven't decided where to put that on the actual post page. It's not of interest to everyone.

J, May 11, 2006 09:31 PM:

I'm proud to say I've made it over one month straight of daily photoblog posts. There are a growing number of utilities such as Google Desktop, Slide.com and the new Vista sidebar that support loading images from RSS feeds, so there are lots of ways to consume the images!

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Travelblog.org

Nullstream Site

I'll be posting to my travelblog.org site over the next few weeks while I'm in Europe. I'll likely do some updates here as well in the photoblog section (Hi George!), but will keep most of the stuff over there for now. I may move the posts back here for archival purposes later on.

So far, the site seems pretty cool. It's free to post to, and lets you host any number of smaller pictures (600px wide) and 50 large format pics. Apparently there's an RSS feed for just my entries, but it's currently blank. As a reader, you can register for email notifications however, and also disable them at any time. What I liked most about this site is that you can drill down to any location in the world and see the most recent entries from people at that location. I'm sure it's a cool way to meet up with people who are in the same place at the same time. Also, it's a great research tool to find out what it's like in a place at a certain time of year.

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Photoblog Site Update

Nullstream Site

I've updated the site templates so that photoblog entries are displayed at full site width. This allows us to post pictures that are 740 pixels wide, rather than the old limit of 480. The navigation bar on Photoblog entries has been compressed to accomodate the wider content area.

Although at first glance this seems straightforward, constraints with MovableType and the <noscript> tag made implementing custom pages for photoblog entries non-trivial. The end solution was to implement some JavaScript trickery to modify the page styles on the fly via the JavaScript document object model (DOM). The solution is actually integrated directly into the navigation bar JavaScript, and doesn't require much overhead at all. Photoblog entries also work correctly with JavaScript disabled in both Firefox and IE.

Enhancement List:

• Full width Photoblog entries
• Bottom of navigation bar is now rounded to match top using -moz-border-radius (Firefox only)
• Front page does not rely on JavaScript for the navigation bar. This allows navigation when JavaScript is disabled, and also allows all content to be properly indexed by search engines
• When JavaScript is disabled, the navigation bar now displays an informative message and link to the main page with non-JavaScript navigation

Paul, September 25, 2005 10:28 AM:

I actually don't like the black bar on the right side. I think that a grey gradient fade to white would be nicer.

J, September 25, 2005 05:42 PM:

How about brushed metal, or maybe aqua?

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New Navigation Bar Implementation

Nullstream Site

At the behest of my co-authors, I've re-implemented the navigation bar that appears on every page of the site. Please comment on this entry if you were bothered by the posting speed in the past, and you notice any change (or no change). Theoretically it should speed things up...

The original mechanism used MovableType's server side 'build time' includes to dynamically insert the comment, category and date listings into the side of each page. This is better than actual server side includes, which will dynamically build the page on each request - instead, MT builds the page only when items in the relevant category, comment, etc. change. This produces a html file rather than an asp or php file.

What we were finding was that page loads were fast, but comment and new entry posts were getting very slow. This is partially becuase our host is somehow throttling our CPU usage on page rebuilds. Then again, our cpu on page rebuilds is growing because each comment post causes ALL pages on the site to be rebuilt (well, not quite... see additional benefit, below).

Continue reading "New Navigation Bar Implementation"...

Comments (2)

John, September 13, 2005 01:04 PM:

J, as always.. you're the man!

J, September 17, 2005 12:06 PM:

I realized since all the navigation bars are now via JavaScript, Google will have to go really deep to index all the pages on the site. It won't have any way to get to the Monthly or Category pages, but it can find a path through each individual entry by following the "previous entry" link on every post. Not sure it follows single URL chains back for hundreds of posts, however. I'm going to return the front page only to having a fixed sidebar so that google can access all of our content directly. This will also allow users with JavaScript disabled to navigate the site. Notice how I just use "Google" to represent "The search engine". It's the new Xerox.

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New Friend Blogs

Nullstream Site

I've added two new blogs in the "friend blogs" section to the right. The first is my sister's travel/photo blog from Central America.

The second is a friend's site with a lively debate forum (that is not yet linked from the home page). If you want to debate politics or celebrity gossip - it's the place to be. There's a decent balance of liberal and conservative over there, although the liberal tends to be more outspoken (and bitter - LOL)!

Rounding it out, we've got Chizzy and Bryan, aka "9 hours ahead"; an interesting blog by expats in Switzerland, and Metrotronic, who posts deep insights into the human condition, and the occasional beautiful photo. Both are great when they actually do updates (ok, ok, we don't update that often either, and we have three authors!).

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Favicon.ico

Nullstream Site

You may notice that the site now has an icon in the toolbar, and since you've bookmarked it, also in your bookmark menu :-)

The icon is a sandcastle, downloaded from Iconfactory (click pic for link). These guys have great quality freeware icons for "non-commercial use". It's really amazing how talented Mac people are. And how roomy 128x128 feels for an icon.

The reason for adding the icon wasn't so much to make us "trés cool", but to ease the reading of common news sites. I like to store commonly visited news sites in the bookmarks toolbar folder by dragging the icon from the address bar into the toolbar (quick links bar for you IE users). This toolbar will rapidly fill up, and it doesn't wrap. I believe there is a Firefox extension to wrap it, but either way - it starts taking a lot of real estate. I realized that you could actually right click on the bookmarks and delete their names! So for sites with an icon, you just get a little icon up in the toolbar. I've managed to cram 8+ site links in a tiny space, and now you can too with the nullstream site!

A little background on how it's done. You simply put a Windows format .ico file in the root of your web server and name it favicon.ico. So our icon is http://www.nullstream.com/favicon.ico. You can download these icons directly via sites like Iconfactory. You can edit them with VisualStudio on Windows, among others. In order for the icon to display in the browser, I had to delete all sizes stored in the file except 16x16x16 and 16x16x256 (the third dimension is color depth).

Adding a favicon is also good because nearly all modern browsers request it each time the site is accessed for the browser session. So your server will show lots of 404 errors for favicon.ico. I figure with web caching, it's actually better for performance to have the file than not have it! Checking for the file will send the request all the way back to a disk check.

Favicon.ico was actually started by IE, which is why the icon isn't a gif, or set of gifs. In classic Microsoft form, however, IE only displays these icons sporadically in their bookmarks or toolbars, and it wasn't till Firebird that I found it useful enough to actually use.

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Feedster

Nullstream Site

No Need to Click Here - I'm just claiming my feed at Feedster

J, February 24, 2005 10:26 PM:

Feedster is being really bad about indexing the site, so I thought claiming the feed would help, given that it has to read the site in order to see the "magic link".

It may also just be feedster - the site is really slow. The other issue I see is that if they're indexing only the XML feeds, do they keep history? You're either only going to be searching the most recent month or so of entries, or really old and stale entries. It's not like the web, where typically everything is kept in an archive.

How lame would a search engine be if it only searched this week's news stories, and everything before that was out of the index.

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Comment Spam

Nullstream Site

Google, Yahoo, MSN, MovableType and others have agreed to not boost search rankings to sites with links marked with the rel="nofollow" attribute set. While this doesn't physically prevent comments on blogs from being created with links back to sites, it does prevent them from doing any good on search rankings. I'm very impressed to see these major search providers working together, as well as the major blogging software packages all jumping on this standard. An elegant solution that everyone can get on board with.

I've updated the site to mark all links within comments with this attribute automatically, so only links within the main posts will do anything to boost search rankings of sites. I believe this also closes the door to trackback links boosting the value of various blogs.

John, January 19, 2005 10:22 AM:

Is there any value to trackback at all now?

J, January 19, 2005 11:36 AM:

Yes, it still allows people to see related stories that other blogs post, so you can hop from blog to blog on a topic. It helps human referrals, just not google rankings!

J, March 16, 2005 08:48 AM:

Interesting new comment spam on the site now. completely random name, email, ip address, url and contents. The URLs actually start with nullstream, but end in a random value and .com. So they're likely a phishing scam. Firefox correctly interprets these links as "file not found" on nullstream, but IE may actually direct to a site.

Not sure why one would bother with random hex characters as the link text (who's clicking on that?). We mark links with nofollow, so it won't affect rankings in the search engines either. Dummies.

We have a mechanism to prevent even these random links (although they foil mt-blacklist pretty well). I'll leave the links up for a day or two in the comments if you want to do some investigation.

J, March 19, 2005 04:01 PM:

I've updated the site to disallow automated spambots. That plus nofollow on links and mt-blacklist should help with nearly all spam.

Every time I write something in perl, I am reminded how nasty and error-prone that language is. It's ridiculous how many web sites back ends are written in perl given the massive risk of overflows and exploits unless the developer is extremely proficient. I would guess that for any beginner to medium level programmer, Java would be the best back end for web software, just because mistakes don't typically have as big an impact.

Paul, March 19, 2005 06:56 PM:

Python

Paul Graham, March 19, 2005 06:57 PM:

Lisp

Paul, March 19, 2005 09:57 PM:

((((((((((((((((+ smart ass))))))))))))))))

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Syndication Formats

Nullstream Site

This blog is syndicated in several formats:
RDF
RSS 1.0
RSS 2.0
Atom

Why are there so many formats?
Read The Battle of the Blogs

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New Website

Nullstream Site

New layout is complete on the main page. Archive pages, individual entries, and post results do not reflect the layout changes yet, but comments can be viewed and posted directly from the main page. Click on a comment to expand the comment section, or show/hide all comments using the side layout. New UI also supports custom styles per author, and simplified posting interface with javascript validation. Layout tested on IE6 and Firefox 1.0.

Paul, November 21, 2004 10:47 AM:

I was just going to say that we really need to do something about the look... nice! Where'd you get the red image?

Paul

J, November 21, 2004 11:40 AM:

It's a lyapunov fractal I generated. The blue background is an Iterated Function System (IFS).

Paul, November 21, 2004 04:21 PM:

Do you mean tested on "IE6 and FireFOX"?

Paul.

J, November 21, 2004 04:45 PM:

Oh yeah, I was getting confused with Thunderbird. Stupid car names...

John, November 21, 2004 05:28 PM:

That problem with the text not rendering in IE is back for me.

J, November 21, 2004 07:04 PM:

What I see is that for this post, half the text is cut off. If you expand the comments, expand all comments, or scroll off the screen and back on, it shows up and doesn't go away. I'm not seeing it on the other posts, so I think it must have to do with the image inline. Are you seeing worse problems than this?

John, November 21, 2004 08:33 PM:

No I'm seeing the same thing. It makes sense that it is the images. We had the problem with the original few posts and then it seemed to go away, but most of the recent posts have not had images in them.

J, November 21, 2004 09:50 PM:

I fixed most of the issue, try it now. I only see a corner of the text not redrawn now (the shaded name in the upper right seems to be drawn over it.) It's called a background image, Microsoft, figure it out! I think it's smooth enough now to go with. That minor annoyance will just keep reminding you to be using Firefox! BTW, I configured some hidden firefox settings and pages load way faster now. I'll blog it.

John, November 22, 2004 01:17 AM:

Yeah, please blog those. I forgot how to get to the config page that Paul showed me. I'm still torn between Firefox and Avant as my main browser. I thought that the blog feed support would push me toward Firefox, but then the new version of Avant has feed support as well. I'll blog a comparison of both when I get time.

J, November 22, 2004 03:44 PM:

Archive pages now match the rest of the site.

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First Post

Nullstream Site

<slashdot>First Post!</slashdot>
Comments (2)

Paul, November 9, 2004 09:32 PM:

Ooooo, I knew you'd do that!

John, November 9, 2004 09:46 PM:

Ahh the sweet sounds of web site contstruction.

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