Category: Website

I turned in my last papers, blogged about a ton of stuff, and finally remembered to say “I’m done.” At the time it didn’t feel like the enormous milestone that it turned out to be. Like anyone else I miss being in school, but I’m glad I’m out—not just because I’m no longer accruing debt, but because it means I actually get to work on meaningful things.

This morning’s extract from Anthony Storr’s essay about Churchill in Churchill’s Black Dog:

…most of us can tolerate disappointment in one sphere of our existence without getting deeply depressed, providing the other spheres remain undamaged. Normal people may mourn, or experience disappointment, but because they have an inner source of self-esteem, they do not become or remain severely depressed for long in the face of misadventure, and are fairly easily consoled by what remains to them.

Depressives, in contrast to these normal folk, are much more vulnerable. If one thing in the external world goes wrong, they are apt to be thrown into despair.…Disappointment, rejection, bereavement may all, in a depressive, pull a trigger which fires a reaction of total hopelessness: for such people do not possess an inner source of self-esteem to which they can turn in trouble, or which can easily be renewed by the ministrations of others. If, at a deep internal level, a person feels himself to be predominantly bad or unlovable, an actual rejection in the external world will bring this belief to the surface; and no amount of reassurance from wellwishers will, for a time, persuade him of his real worth.

Fortunately, I’m not in a mood where the Dog is too close, but I did finally start reading Churchill’s Black Dog. At first I was taken aback. It’s a collection, and only the first story is about Churchill. Also, the author (a psychoanalyst) spends the first 15 pages discussing various theories of Churchill’s temperament. Apparently Sir Winston was an “extraverted intuitive,” “predominantly endomorphic, with a strong secondary mesomorphic component,” and of “cyclothermic temperament.”

At this point the book almost went out the window. But I persevered, and on the next page, following an anecdote about Churchill’s depression before World War II, there comes the line:

Many depressives deny themselves rest or relaxation because they cannot afford to stop. If they are forced by circumstances to do so, the black cloud comes down upon them. … He invented various methods of coping with the depression which descended when he was no longer fully occupied by affairs of state, including painting, writing, and bricklaying, but none of these were wholly successful.…

Hooked. Guess I’ll have to keep reading now…

I have three sources of statistics about the readership of my weblog. One is the built in statistics in Manila, which tells me about referrers and page views in the last 24 hours, and the most read messages since I started the weblog. But it doesn’t tell me anything about the readers doing the page views—browser, IP, source country, anything. Also, it doesn’t report on pages served by my static site, which is where I try to point most of my readers these days.

Another is Site Meter, the seemingly ubiquitous tracking device that shows up on everyone’s blogs. My Site Meter reports give me a few more things, such as showing what the most popular entry and exit pages are, who the most popular browsers are, and so forth. But no ranking of messages by popularity, no reports of 404s, etc. Plus, um, it is a potential privacy violation. (What do they do with that data?)

The third, which I finally was able to access last week, is the actual Apache logs for the static site. And I discovered something about Site Meter: it filters out quite a few things from its Browser report. Like robots. Site Meter claims that most of my visitors run Internet Explorer. Actually, twice as many—over 10,000 visits, or almost 25% of my static site’s traffic—are done by GoogleBot. Which is fine, but another 9% are apparently done by Slurp. And there are lots of other visitors who are running evil bots, like the cunningly named EvilBot.

Which makes me grateful for the new Spam-Free Email feature in Manila. Used to be that if you left a comment, visitors saw your email address. Now they see the name you used to register, and clicking on that takes you to a form that allows you to submit email, but not see their address. Which means that the spambots crawling my site looking for email addresses won’t find any.

A great start. But there are more limitations:

• My RSS file is served by Manila, not Apache, so I can’t see which RSS readers are subscribing to me—or how many distinct people there are, or how often they’re hitting my server.
• I can put a robots.txt file on my static server to control how the robots crawl my site (and I will), but I can’t do the same on Manila.

Ah, for a unified stats solution. In the meantime, two new projects start today on the weblog:

• A robots.txt file for the static site.
• A P3P-compliant (and human-readable!) privacy policy.

New on the blogroll: coworker Dave Kramer and luminaries John Robb, Scott Rosenberg, and Philip Greenspun. Joe Gross’s link was down, but has moved because the Austin American-Statesman broke the permalink we were using.

One year ago today: “Slackjawed in Capri.” I started to tell the story of our trip to the Amalfi Coast with Lisa’s parents, which ended with my being sick as a dog in Rome on Easter.

According to Mark Pilgrim, I’m a peaceblogger. I guess it’s been so long since I posted about anything technical that my techblogging skillz are no longer apparent. (Apparently kung-f00 Google wizardry doesn’t count.) Thanks for the link, Mark, and may I also suggest The Green[e]house Effect; Greg is at least as much of a peaceblogger as me, and he has the political bona fides to go with it.

…I would have gone nuts by now. Honestly. I was thinking today about how crazy I was living by myself in the summer of 2001 during my internship, and how starting the blog got me through many of those dark nights (and occasionally on a road to self-discovery, though not often enough).

I also thought today about how I use this blog. Some of it is as an outboard memory, a commonplace book of things I find useful. Some of it is about things I have to say, or ideas that grab me and don’t let go until I write them down.

And some of it, honestly, is what I do to fill in the corners when I’m uncomfortable and feel myself slipping back into depression. I don’t write about the depression, I just write. It’s activity, and it consumes less thought and is more productive than the alternatives. But it doesn’t face or solve the problem of the depression, it just gets me past it.

I’m going to try to alter my writing patterns to: write fifteen minutes in the morning before work, for half an hour during lunch, and then anything else after dinner. I think if I can keep myself from compulsively blogging every time I feel a little depressed, I can both improve the content of this site (you win) and be more motivated to face depressive episodes head on and manage constructively through them (I win).

Posts are going to my blog but then disappearing from the home page. This is problematic because Weblogs.com gets pinged anyway (though the RSS feed doesn’t update). Anyone seen this on a Manila site before?

Also, the server that runs the editorial part seems to be falling over regularly, and losing many of my changes with it.

There are problems with my website today. If this note appears on my website, the problems are fixed and I can post again.

I just realized I missed an anniversary. My very first page on a website called Jarrett House North was published March 14, 2000. The page was a direct port of the front page of my first personal web site, which I had built in Frontier (back when it was free) on my Power Mac 7200/90 and which I was serving (illegally) over our DSL connection from that Mac using Mac OS 8’s Personal Web Sharing. (The page is still visible at the Internet Archive. Note the damning lack of an actual domain name; I had essentially hijacked the IP address, since Bell Atlantic’s DSL solution wasn’t compatible with Mac OS 8.)

When Dave announced that he was providing free Manila hosting at Editthispage.com for those who wanted to try Manila, I registered my site under the same name I was using for my homebrew site, Jarrett House North. I transferred some of the old content into the Manila site using cut and paste, and then forgot about the site (with a few exceptions) until the summer after my first year of business school.

So when someone asks what my blogaversary is, I tell them my blog was born June 11, 2001, but that it was conceived March 14, 2000 and had a really long gestation period. 🙂

Special bonus: the site map for my old web site is still at the Internet Archive. Compare to the current site map, which only points to my static pages, not to most of my blog content (and hence hasn’t been linked into my main navigation yet). Most of the structure was already set in place in 1999.

A year ago today I was working on understanding OPML and writing scripting solutions around it. I never did get OmniOutliner2OPML working correctly, and Omni released a new version of OmniOutliner that supported OPML directly.

As an AppleScript, though, OmniOutliner2OPML was interesting enough to form the basis of an article over at Studio Log by Jesse Shanks called “OmniOutliner as a Script Analysis and Management Tool” so it wasn’t totally wasted effort.

The script, like any programming that handles outlines, binary trees, and other branching data sets, contains recursive logic that has to process each level of the tree repeatedly. I used to obsess over this sort of stuff for hours in my old day job, writing selective disclosure tree controls for browsing document relationships in workflow applications and trying to make them as lightweight as possible. Because the reality is that tree structures are both easy and gnarly to program—easy, because they are highly repetitive in their structure (does this node have children? if so, ask each of them if they have children, and so forth), and hard because it’s hard to predict how deep the tree will go and how many levels you’ll have to process, and how long it will take.

I’ve added a section of the site that I update with some current reading and listening links. Yes, it’s an Amazon promotion. No, I won’t ever make any money from it. I’m mostly just interested in

1. sharing what I’m listening to
2. keeping track (you can click the fleurons under each listing to see past entries)
3. shaming myself into reading more often

Okay, maybe Gentium won’t work well as a weblog font after all. I couldn’t tell the difference when I made the change on my home Macintosh, but on my XP machine at work the font is much much too small.

Which adds insult to injury, because you can’t resize it. I now have a greater appreciation for Georgia’s design than I did before; it looked almost the same on both machines.

I will be rolling back the stylesheet change, but thinking now more seriously about making the fonts user-resizable.

Courtesy Typographi.ca, a pointer to Victor Gaultney’s Gentium project. Purpose: to build a free multilingual font to bring better typography to thousands of languages around the globe. I can think of no higher calling.

I’ve revised my stylesheets so that Gentium is the preferred font for my article text. If you don’t have the font, the site still renders in Georgia (or Times), but this is my small way of showing support for Gaultney’s project.