IP Block Lists For Email Are Out of Control

Yes, after some considerable amount of reflection on this topic I've reached a conclusion. I feel vulnerable already!

This is a difficult issue really. It arose in response to the thorny and vexatious problem of spam, the scourge of email systems worldwide. Certainly I don't want to have to put up with spam. Sensible people don't. But is the cure as bad as the complaint?

I'm sorry to say that it does seem to be just as big an obstacle to email communication as the spam problem it tries to deal with. And quite frankly, I'm just about as annoyed with this particular so-called solution as I am with spam itself.

The two things that raise my ire are these. Firstly, it is way too indiscriminate. Whole IP address ranges become blocked, rendering communications impossible. This is akin to shooting the messenger or tossing out a bunch of grapes because just one is spoiled. It is unacceptable to cause so much collateral damage to innocent users.

The second annoyance is the extraordinary arrogance of organisations that set themseves up as watchdogs or internet police, invent their own standards and policies in determining addresses to block and when or if they will unblock them and then peddle their block lists to lazy and uncaring subscribing ISPs.

I realise that ISPs feel wearied by the ongoing war against spam and are easy marks for those who offer what seems like a solution. The trouble is, they miss the point. Their war is not actually against spam, it is against spammers. As long as they allow the spammers to keep them focussed on technicalities and the spam itself, we all lose.

To their credit - and I can't beieve I'm saying this, but credit where credit is due - Microsoft had the right idea when they started targetting spammers with bounties and lawsuits. They seemed to realise that spamming is a behavioural and hence person-centred problem, not simply a technical one. But what has happened on that front? I certainly don't know.

Anyway, enough woffling for now.

Health is Its Own Reward

So many people simply don't understand just what health is. I'm not going to woffle on about that here though, it's covered well enough in my Primary Health Care course in a section dedicated to exploring the definition of health. You can always find that through the links in the margin.

No, what I'm woffling on about here is something to celebrate. Find some inspiration and joy in the significant life changes and positive health outcomes of this couple. Which couple you ask? Trish and Chris Powell.

They discovered that a holistic approach to life adds balance. A balanced and whole-of-life embracing lifestyle has one or two really great side effects. One of those is health!

Go and see the changes they have implemented and discover the wellbeing information they freely share. Way to go ...

My Drupal Experience Update

It appears that the potential trap in Drupal to which I referred a couple of days ago in this very blog spot may have missed the real cause of the problem. So perhaps I should explain my latest observations.

Just as an aside, I must say that Drupal has definitely grown on me. I would love the time to delve around a little more in the workings to see where I might be able to contribute. Perhaps next year, by which time it will already be quite different anyway I expect.

Anyway, back to my clarrification. I had quickly found error messages in my logs describing a duplicate content alert after a spider visit. As I explained before, this occurred after I used Drupal's capacity to assign multiple (just two in this case) categories to a post.

The error message was quite explicit about finding two separate paths to identical content, so my earlier concerns and conclusion seemed entirely justified. However, I had also configured the Google sitemap module so I am now wondering if that was causing some or part of the problem. I say this having not had any look at the code at all, it's just a hunch I want to explore.

So my earlier warning of a potential trap is on hold until I experiment with this some more. I will post an update when I have new findings. Clearly there is a potential problem with duplicate content errors, but just what setup results in them occurring has to be clarified.

My Top Ranking Sites

My Top Ranking Sites

Yesterday I posted an update on my Alexa site rankings. It had actually been some days already since the actual Alexa update and today I find they have already updated again.

The news is still quite good. Whew!

Only one site has slipped and it’s more a stabilization than a fall. Take a look below.

www.Healthy-Vitamin-Choice.com was at: 125,278 Now: 120,627
www.Herb-Health-Guide.com was at: 214,489 Now: 202,782
www.The-Health-Gazette.com was at: 188,274 Now: 163,873
www.Education4skills.com was at: 172,465 Now: 173,558

Ken Evoy, of SiteSell fame says:

According to Netcraft.com, there are 56.1 million sites. So, a site with a traffic ranking of 561,000 at Alexa.com (i.e., the 561,000th most trafficked site on the Web) is in the top Top 1 Percent of all sites in the world (561,000 / 56.1 million).

That’s pretty good going then isn’t it. It means all of my sites listed above are in the top 1% of all sites on the internet in terms of traffic ranking.

Actually, it’s even better. Simple math shows that all of my sites are ranked below 280,500 therefore they are all comfortably within the top ½ of 1%. Now, about that law again… what was it? …ummm … oh yes ... gravity! Well, so far so good.

Still Defying Gravity

Still Defying Gravity

On August 20th I posted a set of Alexa site ranking figures. They are posted below along with my most recent update.

www.Healthy-Vitamin-Choice.com was at: 139,138  Now: 124,278
www.Herb-Health-Guide.com was at: 267,267  Now: 214,489
www.The-Health-Gazette.com was at: 266,054  Now: 188,274
Even www.Education4skills.com was at: 184,860  Now: 172,465

I am making this post to test the new Blogger for Word plugin. Let’s see how it goes.

Potential Trap in Drupal and Thoughts on Search Engines

This is just a small point that may be worth tucking away in the back of one's mind. Assuming you use Drupal of course.

One of the strengths of Drupal and applications like it is strong support for semantics. Basically it facilitates what's important in web publishing, namely, communicating meaning.

A good illustration of this in Drupal is the capacity to assign a node (fancy word for a piece of content, like a web page) to more than one conceptual category. For instance, I wrote a piece that was meaningfully related to both vitamins and herbs. Since these are two separate categories, serving independent RSS feeds, it was both easy and semantically sensible to assign the content to both.

So far so good. This means that the content is readily made available to people with an interest in either vitamins or herbs, or indeed both. This is good for publishing meaning-rich content, good for people searching for that content, and you might imagine simply good all round.

Unfortunately, Drupal actually makes two separate paths leading to the same content. This serves the ideal arrangement extolled above, but, the search engines don't like it! You might think they would love it. After all, they're about providing meaningful content to searchers aren't they?

The trouble is, their supposedly sophisticated, semantically aware algorithms can't cope. You see, they are still bruised by spammers who simply replicate content on multiple sites (or paths) in the hope of snaring more space in the search engines and thereby increasing their likely exposure to searchers. They can't tell the difference between a spammer's attempt to trick them into indexing multiple copies of identical content and the perfectly sound, semantically driven, multiple paths to appropriate content illustrated above.

I discovered this in my Drupal logs (an excellent system for monitoring activity on the site incidently) when I saw red error messages about duplicate content after a spider visited. So what to do hey?

Normally, when what is sensible conflicts with the dictates of the search engines I go with what makes sense and forget about the search engines. Why? Simply because I am one of those old duffers with principles. Many would say I'm crazy, but my way of thinking goes like this.

Within reason it is a great idea to be flexible and to adapt to fit in with the search engine expectations. It must be noted that overwhelmingly they are sensible folk who want to do the right thing by everyone, so they don't set out to do any harm. Following Google's webmaster guidelines, for example, makes sense because the ideas themselves make sense.

However, when they get it wrong or are unreasonable, I go with what I think is right and ignore the search engines. You see, my view is that it is their job to fit in with what makes sense. In essence, they have to follow me, rather than me follow them. Not because I'm personally able to lead them, but because I'm following sound principles. It's the principles they need to get aboard. I do not believe in letting the search engines become dictators.

In this case though, I'm inclined to avoid dual paths. I am not sufficiently experienced in the management of a databse driven website, so I will err on the side of caution for now. However, I'll be keeping an eye on this issue. It is one area in which the search engines need to improve their analysis. I won't hold my breath though.

Drupal Progress Report

There's nothing to get wildly excited about yet, but I must say there is a deep-down growing attachment forming between Drupal and moi. If ever there was an application that needed a serious makeover in the usability and documentation departments, this is certainly one for that list.

Come to think of it, usability and documentation are quite related. However, to be clear, improvements in the administrative workings, layout, manipulation of the many available components and their interactivity is what's urgently needed.

A lot of thought and work has clearly been put into this but, frankly, it smacks of do hickory, and is quite unprofessional. Of course, it is unprofessional; the work of a distributed, volunteer community. So my comments should be taken as a critique that sets benchmarks and goals, rather than a criticism of the people concerned.

And speaking of those people, apart from a somewhat grumpy, defensive and arrogant attitude in the forums, they have achieved quite a feat. Drupal is actually quite powerful and seems thus far to be exceptionally stable. So don't let my "warts and all" evaluative comments detract from recognizing the exceptional product that is Drupal.

Actually, calling Drupal a product doesn't feel quite right. It feels more organic than that. Perhaps there is something of each of it's developers and contributers in it. A community development project can certainly take on a life of its own. I suspect Drupal has done that.

So what have I actually achieved? Yes, I did title this a progress report so that's a fair question.

Well, I now have mastered (hmmm, maybe mastered is a bit strong... perhaps tamed) the menu and navigation system and have posted several pages and made several blog posts. These have been appropriately turned into RSS feeds and I have managed to use CaRP on both Healthy Vitamin Choice and Herb Health Guide to pull those feeds into suitable HTML pages.

You can see the places I've placed various feeds here:

• Full feed in home page margin at Healthy Vitamin Choice
  
• Vitamin feed in the blog page at Healthy Vitamin Choice
• Herbs feed at bottom of home page at Herb Health Guide
  
• Full feed in the about the Health Gazette page at Herb Health Guide
  
• Bottom of the site map page at Herb Health Guide (for good measure!)
  

Much of the progress has been on the non-Drupal sites, but was totally contingent on getting The Health Gazette (on Drupal) up an running correctly.

Well that's it for now. I have an ezine to publish...

So Far, So Good with Drupal

This is just a quick update to confirm that things still seem to be coming together using Drupal. Progress was a little set back because I uploaded several new modules to extend the functionality and goofed.

I activated the modules in the module activation form (duh...) and planned on getting around to the full installation later. Big mistake. Activation means, funnily enough, activation. So that left me with multiple modules only partly installed and hence not working correctly. As in, not working properly!

No real biggie; an easy recovery. Lots of error messages streamed all over the screen so there was no way the errors could go unnoticed. I simply then had to deactivate the modules and then do a proper installation for each one. I've started working through them and it's going well.

I guess I can say that I am learning to live with Drupal and at this stage of progress I can say "so far, so good". More later...

Pressing on With Drupal

What a difference persistence makes. I was sooo... tempted to quit. Struggling up the steep and tortuous Drupal learning curve was getting past any type of joke. However, I stuck in there for just that little bit longer and 'bingo', the breakthrough came.

I can't say I'm a fan yet and I still have a long way to go. But the good news is that I have managed to solve some of the biggest problems and, whether documented elsewhere or not, I've made my own workarounds to set it up in a way that I think will be workable.

Now I grant you that isn't a full-on endorsement. I'm nowhere near that stage. But having hung in there and stuck at it like I did I'm gratified to have made the progress I've achieved. I now can see that with a bit more work I can get this software to perform more-or-less the way I want it to, and that's no minor achievement for a Drupal newbie I can assure you.

So this post is really about celebrating a minor achievement and actually noting that, as the saying has it, persistence pays. It is a good feeling and I might as well enjoy it. Lord knows I've earned it!!

Struggling on with Drupal

I thought this post would be about my replacement for Drupal but I am still struggling on for the moment. Must be a glutton for punishment.

Part of the problem with Drupal seems to be that, ... well, how can I put this, ummm, it's not a product of programmers perhaps. I get the impression that the idea people driving the project are really library science or information management people. Very frightening things happen when such people get the idea that they know about information technology, software development, user interfaces, and everything else in the software development life cycle.

For all of their probable information management ability, they still don't know how to communicate. Their documentation and crazy implementation really are bad and they don't like to be told. No wonder so many people just move on to other software and dump Drupal.

I'm willing to cut my losses if I must. At this stage though I'll give it just a little bit longer. If you're following this saga though, don't hold your breath waiting for a happy ending; it may just not happen.

We shall see soon enough.

Drupal Verdict Not In

Well I did manage to solve the problems I encountered with Drupal by a complete reinstall. I did this one with a fresh and up-to-date version from drupal.org rather than use the Fantastico version (they never seem to be sufficiently up-to-date unfortunately).

If you detect a somewhat flatter tone to this post than might be expected given that the problem has resolved, you are quite right. Very perceptive, well done.

I am not convinced that Drupal actually offers as useful an application as they describe. There appears to be plenty of power (at least potentially) but it's pretty well buried beneath a ton of unnecessary overhead in two critical areas.

1. wastefully steep learning curve due to pretty bad documentation
2. tortuous and cumbersome administration that defies sensible usability

Let's briefly look at those points again. There is certainly a good deal of documentation on the web and it appears to be slowly receiving some development attention. Unfortunately, it largely fails to communicate. Some is in obscure technical language (not just technical, obscure technical!) and some just reflects a diffident and defensive attitude, which are not helpful.

I get the feeling that some developers treat their work as a tad too precious. The open source orientation may be a thin veneer for some.

The point to a CMS is that it should robustly, safely manage data (information really) and facilitate its publication. It's that facilitation that causes some problems with Drupal. It is actually a quite totuous affair to get anything set up and productive.

The small core and many addon package rubric works well in theory and practice. Normally! In this case it results in an interminable collection of sections and pages and one is always left wondering how many pages must be visited to set something up. Then, to actually get something published, again, many steps, many pages. What a pain. Perhaps this improves with practice, but it currently reflects very poor design.

I am also unimpressed with the W3C standards non-compliance encountered with Drupal. This is pretty-well unforgivable.

Now it may sound as though the verdict is indeed in. Not so. The fact is I need to find a suitable replacement before I can simply dump Drupal. I think a little more searching may actually be worthwhile.

Stay tuned.

Drupal Heavy Going

Well I had hoped for a shorter or flatter learning curve with Drupal. Alas, it is not working out that way at all.

I've encountered bugs with the htmlarea plugin and noticed that even before I installed it the actual markup of postings was buggy. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't. They're the worst type of bugs.

There is a support portal but it is pretty unfriendly and has a particularly defensive and diffident tone. Thorough searching revealed others with the problem but no real resolution. Disappointing.

I will attempt a fresh installation, which is a time-wasting pain in the neck actually, and see if that resolves the issues. I certainlly hope so because Drupal looks quite promissing. However, if it doesn't, that will be the end of my Drupal excitement/experiment.

The next possibility should Drupal fail to respond to treatment is Nucleus CMS. It is not in the same league as Drupal in terms of functionality or power, but by all accounts, it works. Though tempted to cut my losses on Drupal early and make the switch now, I think I'll give Drupal one more shot.

OK, here we go.

Drupal Power

Wow! This Drupal CMS is very powerful. It is within its own right, but with the contributed modules it is awesome.

I am still finding it just a little bit strange... well, no, actually I am finding it quite strange to be honest, but I am learning. A l w a y s learning.

The last module I added was one that adds HTML authoring functionality that dramatically extends the already useful text area authoring. So much power, so little time!

I must say that I was very impressed with the code that Drupal output to screen for the first page I made. I couldn't resist checking its validity with W3C. Sure enough, it validates as XHTML 1.0 Strict. Very impressive.

Unfortunately, after some distractions that took me away from my computer for a while (probably a very good thing actually) and the learning curve encountered, I am running rather behind with my publishing of content. Not to worry; I'll get there.

I often use the saying and certainly believe the truth expressed as follows:

Inch by inch,
life's a cinch.
Yard by yard,
it's bloomin' hard.

So, little by little I'll easily make the distance. Better get back to it now.

What Goes Up ...

Actually this is one time when I'd love to break the law!!!

The law of gravity that is.

You see I have those quite new websites that I've mentioned here before and have listed in the right-hand margin. Yes, they're the ones, my recent health education sites. Each site aims to inform (indeed, to genuinely educate) and empower people to achieve tremendous health and wellbeing. I'm tired of playing catch-up and merely patching-up illness, sickness and disease. I love to transform people's lives for the better - or rather to play a part in showing people how they can do this for themselves.

In this I'm an odd professional indeed. I don't believe people are best served by making and keeping them dependent on those of us "in the know". Professionalism is quite arrogant in some ways. Instead, I prefer to share knowledge, to at least make it available in usable ways.

Ok, ok, enough of the rant. So what's this stuff about defying gravity?

Well that's simple really. Those sites I mentioned have been well received and are getting more and more traffic. As a result my Alexa rankings have shot skyward from 5 million plus to the following as of yesterday.

www.Healthy-Vitamin-Choice.com is at: 139,138

www.Herb-Health-Guide.com is at: 267,267

www.The-Health-Gazette.com is at: 266,054

Even www.Education4skills.com is at: 184,860

The great thing is that a rising ranking represents increasing traffic so you see I'd love for the old saying that "what goes up, must come down" to be wrong. That's a saying powered by gravity, so I guess I'd love to break that law!

I Took The Plunge

Well yes, I did it. Did what you ask? Hmm... tut, tut, you haven't been keeping up with this blog have you? Avid followers would know full well that I refer to the giant leap into Drupal CMS for The Health Gazette site.

So, yes, I did it. I guess on reflection, my frustration with and reservations about WordPress were even greater than I had expressed. I must say at the outset that I can see some slight shortcomings in Drupal and I certainly have a lot to learn about managing it, but - and this is the exciting bit - I have already gone live!

Yes, you can see my fledgling efforts at The Health Gazette now. Please understand that it is brand new and I have a mountain of work ahead just to get some "starter" content posted.

No lengthy delays seemed necessary or justified. Frankly, it had been delayed for long enough.

With this CMS software I can include considerable interaction with readers. Actually, I am delighted with the realization that readers or visitors can actually become members, allowing the creation of a real online health community. Now that obviously won't happen overnight, but it is an exciting prospect nonetheless.

The interaction is offered in several ways on the site itself. Some content pages offer the option to respond with feedback and to provide feedback on the feedback. There are also blogs and even forum software.

Practically everything produced within and managed by Drupal is also made available as an RSS feed. This means that individuals can take content into their feed readers or XML feed equipped applications. The Health Gazette ezine is made available as an emailed edition of new content at least monthly so this is adds to the pot, so to speak.

The Health Gazette is the ezine or newsletter for my existing family of sites that you can see listed on right page margin.

Hey, if you're reading this, why not pop over to the site and take a look around. You could even leave some feedback! See you there, I'm back onto that content...

Frustrated with WordPress

No doubt WordPress is a very fine application with many dedicated and highly competent contributors to its development and extension. It has certainly proven immensely popular. At this point in time however, I am ready to abandon it completely.

Why? Well, it's just too frustrating to wrestle with creating a decent layout with the WordPress method of breaking things into multiple files. I quite understand the approach and agree that it has some virtue, but it is certainly not necessary to use that approach and I personally find it far too cumbersome.

I think the inclusion of php templates in addition to xhtml (css based) layout and css for styling is a bit much (no pun intended). The php template's integration with the css-based layout simply adds a layer of confusion to the process in my humble opinion. Why bother? A plain XHTML solution is far more straightforward.

A few other WordPress issues have also emerged. I have some concerns about security. These follow any application's massive uptake unfortunately. The very popularity of the software entices hackers of the black hat variety, idiotic kiddie-script nuisances, virus writers and so on. The frequency of "security updates" for WordPress is all the evidence one needs of these problems.

I have also noticed that many existing WordPress implementations appear "broken" on some pages. This may be a dropped or misalligned column for example. Very untidy, quite unsatisfactory.

So I am currently exploring Drupal CMS as a likely alternative. It offers everything I need and then some, so it may well be suitable well into the future. It is a little qwerky in it's approach, though mainly in choice of nomenclature, and there is a somewhat defensive tone to its online documentation which has a certain "try-hard" feel to it. Nevertheless, so far it looks to be quite robust and it offers simple-enough layout and presentation control.

I did notice that its next release is evidently going to use a phptemplate 'engine' to manage layout and presentation styles, but that may prove either avoidable or quite workable so I won't let that put me off for now.

Well, back to it then. So, what's this taxonomy stuff ...

More Progress at Healthy Vitamin Choice

Well it is quite exciting to see the steady climb up the Alexa site rankings of sites that one owns. Since all of my sites actually are written by highly qualified experts in the relevant field (my wife and myself !!) it is gratifying to see that quality content can overtake at least some of the junk sites produced merely by "online marketers".

The site that caught my attention this morning is Healthy Vitamin Choice. As of today, Monday 15 August 2005, the ranking is 154,311. Not exactly the top 10 or even the top 100,000 but when you consider that it has only had content for a couple of months and has had no promotion other than a couple of inbound links for spiders to crawl, it is still quite good.

Those spiders have resulted in some search engine listings and hence some traffic. Over the weekend I also listed the site in a half-dozen directories. I will be quite interested to see what happens to the site when Google does its next update in a couple of months or so from now.

Like I said on the site, it is disappointing to see so many sites in the important area of health, that are not written or produced by people who actually know what they are talking about when it comes to health and wellbeing. Don't get me wrong here: I'm not for a moment suggesting that one should be a health professional to teach others about health. I am a health professional and I strongly believe that such teaching must not be completely left to the professionals. Indeed, many non-health-professionals know a great deal about health and wellbeing and could teach us all a few things.

What I am unhappy with however, is the sleaze and junk element. The people who merely want to cash in on promoting some health products or services. These people neither know about health nor care about others and are motivated by little more than self-interest.

If these people were entirely harmless I would be comfortable with my usual freedom-loving live and let live attitude. But these greedy marketers turn their skills to promoting rubbish that does no good and can certainly cause harm and in the process they distract people from finding quality information. Even their skillful domination of internet marketing and web-based promotion avenues tends to block the availability of important information.

Anyway, enough of the gripes. It is much better to tackle them head-on and to present quality information and get it out there, otherwise they win by default. So it is good to see progress on the Alexa ranking for my site. I know it offers quality health education that can empower those who find and use it. Go take a look - and tell your friends about it. And be well :)

Not To Be Perverse, But...

I must say it is just a little amusing to see how the Google semantic matching algorithm struggles to determine appropriate matches for the little adds that appear on this site. Don't get me wrong, I am very impressed generally speaking with the technology and I do appreciate Google's offer to let me place a few adds on this site. Who knows, maybe some lost souls will wander into the site one day and fall on an add and I'll make as much as several cents all at once.

Still, it must be a challenge for the program to decipher just what I'm on about with all this woffling :)

Well, I thought I'd wind down with this little post. It's just about to turn 1 am here so I think I'll get an early night!

Still Stuck ...

I still haven't managed to sort out the three column, flexible, XHTML and CSS W3C compliant, main-content-first source blog template for WordPress. It sounds complicated when expressed in one sentence, but it really isn't all that demanding.

The sole obstacle to just knocking one up myself is not feeling confident enough with php. However, it is starting to look like I'll just have to bite the bullet on this and "just do it!".

What a pain hey? Oh well, here we go again...

OK, I'm Over It...

Yes thanks, I feel much better now. Hmm, yep, that's right... I took my own advice.

Today was the day Dr Mani ran his 24 hour blogathon. I hope you donated, every bit helps, small or large. Of course, if you can manage large, then please do give generously.

Dr Mani is a paediatric cardiothoracic surgeon with a heart of gold. He runs a blogathon to raise funds for the sole purpose of providing extremely cost-effective heart surgery for poor children.

What does heart surgery cost in western countries? Thosands of dollars?... tens of thousands of dollars perhaps? Yes, and even six figure sums. Well at the hospital where Dr Mani has provided many children with effectively a new life they can do the operations for US$3,000. No, that's not a typo - it's really just three thousand dollars. Remarkable isn't it?

Rather than put a link here for you to follow, I encourage you to do a Google search for Dr Mani. You could add 'blogathon' or 'heart surgery' or several other things, but just go ahead and do the search. You'll find the results quite interesting. And yes, I'm sure you could donate to his registered charity at any time, not just during the blogathon. Give the gift of life, there is none greater.

O v e r l o a d - A Real Problem on The Web

Have you spent long on the web? Have you ever felt like screaming. You know, a really good aaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrhhhhhh!!!!! It may help to relieve some of the frustration-like feelings experienced as a result of sheer overload. It's a very real sensory overload that so many of us experience from time to time on the web and I suggest you take it seriously.

It's just so easy and so, well, obvious to suggest that some time off would be a good idea. Don't you hate it when people tell you to do what you already know, as if it is sage advice. Or perhaps someone said you should get some more exercise, preferably outdoors, away from your computer. The nerve!

No, somehow, even knowing that what they say is right, these suggstions just don't help. What we need in these circumstances isn't clever and blindingly obvious recommendations. We just need a little understanding. Perhaps a little space to do what must be done. Oh, and yes, that scream.

Now for this scream to be therapeutic, it has to be deep and long lasting. None of those little, pathetic, high-pitched squeals. No; only the real deal will cut it. So go ahead. Take at least three slow, deep breaths and then go for it. Give it a shot - it is bound to help you feel better.

Think I'm nuts? Think maybe I've lost it, got the odd 1 perhaps, where I should have a zero? Well, maybe, but did you scream? Go ahead and do the therapy, then you'll know that I'm onto something with this. So do it; connect with your feelings from deep within and express them forcefully, meaningfully, powerfully in the real world.

Now, you may want to warn your co-workers if any are nearby. No need to terrify them. So do it. If you think an apple a day keeps the doctor away, believe me, a scream will have your doctor running for the hills!

Enjoy. Remember, today is not a dress rehaersal for life. It is the real thing. Do the best you can with it.

Back To The 3 Column Flexible Blog Template Drawing Board

What, you didn't know there was such a thing? Of course there is. How else do you think all those templates get made? Obviously someone out there has the drawing board ;-)

Well, all attempts at jokes asside, I'm again looking for a suitable blog template. It has to be a three column, flexible, XHTML and CSS W3C compliant speedster. Now that can't be too much to ask, surely.

However, it isn't as easy to find as one might hope. To be honest, I had my eye on the sites of a couple of snazzy designers of just such beasties as this and I hoped that while I was busy with my intervening development project they might have something available.

Alas not. One has released a development version of the three column, flexible design that currently occupies his attention, but when I looked at it I was quite disappointed. It only targets XHTML 1.0 Transitional (a bit of a low target IMHO) and uses tables for layout, an unforgivable sin. The other chap is happily tweaking his pet little two column giraffe.

Just as an aside, while I'm typing this quick update, my other system is receiving dozens of emails containing Worm.SomeFool.P that some idiot has created and some other idiot has fallen foul to. If only we could educate people on how to avoid infections we could knobble the worm, trojan and virus creators in quick time. Unfortunately there is no shortage of inept users who are easy prey for these miscreants. And yes, I was a victim of a virus that took down my system to the point of reformatting quite recently, so I was an idiot too.

Anyway, back to this note. So, what to do hey? It is starting to look ominously like I will again have to develop my own template. Creating suitable CSS tools for web servers is fine, but I haven'y messed about too seriously with the innards of WordPress and all that php stuff. Maybe I'll sleep on it and see if inspiration strikes.

Page Rotation Complete

Doesn't it feel good when you wrestle with and solve a problem to your complete satisfaction. It certainly does to me. And yes, I am enjoying that feeling right now.

Yes, I have resolved the rotation issue. I now have several pages on my new site where a couple of dozen small clinical case descriptions randomly rotate on each fresh page load. This keeps the pages interesting for visitors who may need to visit the pages concerned several times in order to access other pages covering individual medicinal herbs. So the prime objective of providing a good visiting experience for the people who land on those pages has, I think, been met.

The great thing about the solution is that it uses standard SSI which ensures that loaded pages have complete text content and are therefore search-engine spider friendly. There is no JavaScript in the solution at all.

The program that handles the random assignment of cases to individual page requests is written in PERL. The standard includes also manage to work on regular HTML pages. I don't like changing some page extensions in a site to SHTML and I certainly don't like making them all SHTML when the vast majority don't need to be parsed.

What has me so chuffed is the way I did this. Actually it is precisely the way it is "supposed" to be done; straight out of the Apache Manual. In the manual it specifically says not to do it the way so many people are told to do it.

I found plenty of references to hacks and workarounds that all basically involved setting up either one's Apache conf file or doing the same thing in the .htaccess file to force the Apache web server to parse all HTML pages as if they were SHTML pages. Ugly stuff really. This achieves success for the pages that do happen to have "includes" at the price of unnecessary server workload.

The far more elegant and efficient method uses the so-called XBitHack. Now I know the reference to 'hack' is somewhat disconcerting, but you must remember that it comes from within the Apache community. With a server name of a-patch-ee and recollection of the history of the name, it not only seems less worrying, it actually seems appropriate.

What does it involve? Nothing more than setting the owner's permissions eXecute bit on the individual html files that need to be parsed. I made a simple entry in my .htaccess and then used my ftp application to CHMOD the bit and voila! ...it worked. It's very sayifying to use the right solution rather than the often recommended but wrong solution.

HTML Page Rotation

There's always something new to learn on the web. It never seems to end. I'm not complaining, I think this is just fine.

My most recent challenge has been related to setting up some page rotations inside some existing HTML pages. I actually have many clinical case studies that I want to rotate through several pages that give access to information but would themselves be somewhat boring. The solution is to rotate the cases through those otherwise boring pages to keep them interesting for visitors.

I investigated various solutions. One can use php or SSI or JavaScript driven by PERL. They each offer their own benefits.

So far I have found one excellent piece of software that works very well. It certainly does the job. It is written in PERL and, unfortunately as it turns out, uses JavaScript on the page in which it embeds the rotated content. I say unfortunately because this renders the case study content invisible to the search engines, which I think is a big downside.

I certainly am not ruled by the dictates of the search engines. However, they are very useful and I see no problem with accommodating them when the benefits are mutual.

So back to the drawing board, so to speak. My next solution uses PERL to manage the rotation but does the insertion of the rotated case study content by standard SSI. This is probably the best way for me to go but at present I am having some difficulty persuading my server to work properly with includes while sticking with dot HTML file names.

I know that I can setup MIME types on my Apache server or use the .htaccess file but neither of those workef for some reason when I tried them last night. Mind you, I was pretty tired, so I had best try again with a fresher mind.

OK, off to do just that then...

Herbal Medicine Site Apology

I must apologise for announcing the publication of my new site, Herb Health Guide, before I even had the home page completed. Sorry about that.

I had finished all the site except for the main home page. I generally find that it's best to complete the site first and then, with the breadth of the site fresh in my mind, go ahead and finish the job by writing the home page. This time I published with a blank home page!

Well, not completely blank actually. All of the links worked. It's just a bit disconcerting to see masses of blank space where there should be plenty of written information. Oh well, I'll get over it :)

So first this apology. Next is the fix. That's right, this apology got precedence over the actual fix. So I must dash off now and write that home page.

Actually, come to think of it, I also have to add several clinical case studies to the site, and figure out a way to program a rotation script so I can keep the case studies fresh for repeat visitors. Hmmm... seems like I stil have a few chores ahead to get the site completed. Still, it is live and already offers nearly 150 pages of excellent information.

If you are interested in health, and especially if you would like to know more about the use of herbs for health, go check it out.

Perlfect Search

It just occurred to me that I didn't acknowledge someone that I think I should. So here I am to set that right.

When I developed my recent sites I realised that since they have well over 100 pages of detailed content each, I needed to provide a site search facility for visitors. The hunt was on.

There is no shortage of search engines.

There are simple little ones that don't spider the content. They expect the installer to provide a long list of searchable (or more correctly, findable) terms, complete with the page reference details. Imagine what a huge pain-in-the-neck that would be for a sizable site. Actually, come to think of it, for any sized site.

The next step up adds limited assistance. They actually extract key terms from the keyword and sometimes description tags of the pages. That's definitely a big improvement, but in reasonably complex, genuinely content-rich pages, there is no way the meta tags can ever contain all the words and terms of value to a searcher. So they are quite inadequate too.

Some are available that will spider the whole site and index the words found. These are great. Very helpful indeed. In this group there remains considerable diversity however. More sifting required.

Some are quite rigid in their presentation of search results. You can have the results any way you like, so long as it's their way!

Some are ridiculously expensive. They sometimes offer a free version but restrict usage to sites of less than a limited number of pages, such as 50 or 100. Not much use if you happen to have a few pages over the limit. Unless you pay of course but the prices seem too high for sites that offer information for free.

The big players haven't neglected this market either. They all want some of the action. So Google, Yahoo!, FreeSearch and others offer their services too. But they introduce more issues and simply muddy the water.

For instance, Google may let you use their excellent search technology for site-search functionality, but they only respider the site when they are good and ready, not as often as one might like or need. The other big players all suffer from this problem. Some will make this problem go away - you guessed it - for a price.

Anyway, not to unduely waffle on too much (remember I'm actually a woffler) I found the perfect solution. Actually, the Perlfect solution. Perlfect search offers a totally free search engine written in the robust and proven PERL.

It's powerful. It spiders everything and does it on your command, so there's no need to wait. It is super flexible and the results can be completely customised to fit in with the look and feel of your site design. There are many setup options to wring heaps of power and functionality from the application or it can be used pretty much as is with excellent results. It even generates XHTML W3C valid pages!

I could go on and on about it here but here's a better idea. Go and see for yourself. You can go and put it through its paces on my site or go and get more info from the developers at Perlfectsearch.

And did I mention, it's free? Yep, seriously. It is provided under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation. Outstanding!

Welcome to August

Well I didn't get to make the couple of extra posts I'd hoped to fit into July. Too bad, ... welcome to August.

I haven't been idle. I have managed to almost complete the web development project I mentioned in my last post. You remember the one ... that one I had to drop another project to do. Talk about busy. Anyway, the intervening project is almost complete and it's now time to get back to the original website (which is a blog site plus more).

So what has kept me from finsihing the first site? Ok, I'll tell you: it has been the development of another health education site called Herb-Health-Guide.com. If you are interested in health and wellbeing then go take a look. If you are interested in herbal medicine and especially if you want to learn enough to be empowered to safely make your own herbal medicines, then what are you waiting for ... click over to their now.