Fini, tout est fini... Malgré tout le bien que je pense de Blosxom,j'ai décidé de laisser la gestion de mon blog à WordPress, excessivement populaire dans le monde des outils de blog.
Cette décision vient après une attaque plutôt inattendue de comment spam, qui est arrivée le jour suivant la création d'un nouveau post... Bloquer les vieux posts n'est plus suffisant, et la gestion nécessaire pour laisser passer un commentaire valide devenait vraiment trop contraignante. Par ailleurs, cela fait un petit moment que Blosxom n'a pas évolué et la gestion du plugin registry devient un peu chaotique.
Bien sûr, je vais regretter la simplicité de la gestion des posts: une simple arborescence, avec des fichiers texte bruts, la beauté de l'écriture du code en perl, etc., mais dans le long terme, WordPress me permettra de contrôler plus facilement l'ensemble, même s'il ajoute la lourdeur du php et d'une base de donnéees MySQL derrière.
Le flux RSS de ce blog doit donc être transféré à celui-ci, alors que le blog en soi reste toujours à la même adresse.
Il me reste encore à modifier le CSS pour créer un design vraiment personnel (pour l'instant, j'utilise un thème généreusement fourni par la communauté de WordPress, tout de même plus élégant que ceux créés par les geeks de blosxom, il faut le dire!), mais tous les posts et commentaires ont déjà été transférés.
Juste un petit mot pour dire que le système de galerie, que j'utilise sur ce site vient
de sortir une nouvelle version, très justement (mais simplement) nommée
Gallery2. Je viens de finir de l'installer et le passage s'est plutôt fait en
souplesse, et je trouve la nouvelle version beaucoup plus facile à administrer,
avec notamment des fonctions pour manipuler les images par bloc, un menu plus
accessible, la possibilité de créer des liens pour avoir la même photo dans
deux albums différents, par exemple, etc.
Cette nouvelle version est aussi plus élégante, aussi bien d'un point de vue esthétique que technique, car les pages générées sont entièrement en XHTML, avec une petite base de données pour gérer tout ça derrière. La mise en page se fait encore malheureusement avec des tableaux, mais bon, on ne va pas être trop geek non plus, ce n'est pas si grave et ça marche bien.
Dernière chose suffisamment plaisante pour être mentionée, cette version de gallery est beaucoup plus rapide que la version de test que j'avais installée il y a presque deux ans. Elle est quasiment aussi rapide que la version 1 de gallery, mais l'utilisation de la base permet une gestion beaucoup plus propre des images.
Gallery est évidemment gratuit et développé par des bénévoles motivés. La version que j'utilise actuellement n'est pas encore la version finale, c'est encore une version beta, mais elle est déjà suffisamment avancée et stable pour l'utilisation que j'en fais.
Bon, ça ne va plus: en tapant mon prénom et mon nom sur google, on ne tombe même pas sur mon site web! Le premier lien parle effectivement de moi, c'était à l'époque ou Bruno et moi jouions à Diablo sur le net: Bruno avait créé une newsgroup publique sur l'Internet pour qu'on puisse s'échanger des messages entre les différents joueurs.
Le deuxième lien est celui de Riwal qui me remercie de l'avoir aidé à réaliser sa page web (j'avais en fait aidé sa future femme Nadia, en écrivant le squelette en XHTML et en utilisant des CSS)...
Le troisième lien, quant à lui, est un site d'anecdotes en russe où l'on trouve apparemment mon nom! Une traduction approximative raconte de manière subjective l'histoire d'une personne qui a dû aller travailler un dimanche matin où il aurait bien préféré rester au lit. Pire que ça, en allant chez le client, l'ingénieur sur place a un nom imprononçable. C'est au-delà de mes forces, dit-il.
Et oui, s'appeler Eddie Hui-Bon-Hoa n'est pas courant et peu sont ceux qui n'ont pas eu de difficultés à le prononcer la première fois... Et pourtant, ca ne suffit pas à se retrouver classé en première position dans les moteurs de recherche!
L'objet de ce message est donc de remettre un peu les choses en place, vu que je n'ai pas été très brillant à me placer correctement, j'espère que la mention de mon nom rétablira justice!
Ça me permettra peut-être d'être référencé dans Google, autrement que par la recherche de mots clés suspects: tapez donc private pictures dans Google, et mon site apparaît en première position, suivi de près par "Gay Adult Private Picture Homepages"...
Avant même de commencer la nouvelle année, je commence par une bonne résolution. Ou plutôt, une mauvaise, ça dépend d'où on voit les choses... L'idée me trottait dans la tête depuis déjà un petit moment, mais au vu des longs jours sans mise à jour sur ce site, aussi bien que des dizaines de photos qu'il me faut mettre en ligne, je ne vais pas me torturer plus longtemps à essayer d'écrire des phrases dans un anglais trop structuré par les mails professionnels que je ponds toute la journée. Alors, comme il est si bien dit dans "Les Sous-Doués passent le Bac", franchement, pourquoi est-ce que je me casserais le cul? Ce blog sera désormais en bon français, ce qui permet par ailleurs de constater ma haute culture cinématographique.
Évidemment, cela va rendre l'écriture de ce blog plus aisée et aussi plus naturelle. En revanche, je ne garantis rien sur la qualité du contenu, les mécontents ou les déçus ne sont probablement pas en train de lire ce message de toute façon! Adieux veaux, vaches, cochons, détracteurs de ce site, cette page se recentre et si la lecture pour les rares visiteurs internationaux en devient plus difficile, elle est facilitée et plus agrémentée pour les francophones. Finalement, et c'est peut-être le point principal, je retrouve une joie de blogger (pour utiliser un barbarisme dès le début, ça commence bien), que j'avais perdue, quand l'illusion de Babel s'est estompée.
Pour finir sur un détail de geek, ce blog est maintenant en UTF-8, ce qui me permet de taper du bon français dans le code source, en même temps qu'un peu de japonais (et je le prouve: 白身, le kanji original de "shiromi"), sans jouer avec des codes html illisibles.
For those who happen to
visit my gallery and think some
pictures are nice but the rest is just snapshots (and they may be right about it!),
I have made a special album
of my favorite 100 pictures.
Some of them are aesthetic, but other ones just remind me of people I love, and even if they may not mean much to everyday visitors, I like to keep a place for them in that album.
The album may be updated, as I want to keep the images count to 100 in this album, so I will be replacing pictures as I take more. Hopefully, the quality will increase over time. All the pictures were taken from 1999 up to now (November 2004).
I found out about a major flaw in the calendar plugin for blosxom. after my website was suspended again. I started to wonder if there could really be a problem, since that happened with my previous provider too so I called up Bluehost's support team and asked about the problem. First of all, I have to say thanks to their support: contrary to my previous provider, they had a Call Center, which made things much smoother. Additionally, they were able to provide accurate information about the name of the process, the time, the amount of CPU usage, etc.
Thanks to those details and after a quick search in Google, I found an interesting page, where the problem was mentioned. Basically, if you input a bad month in the URL, the plugin will get into an infinite loop, which may use up all resources on the server.
The fix proposed in the page is quite simple: just run a test on the month, and if it's greater than 12 or lower than 1, just force its value to 12 (for example). Assuming there may be other problems, I've just got rid of this plugin and replaced it by the flat archives plugin, visible on the right hand side of this page.
Damn it! Maybe that stupid provider was right about the high CPU usage after all, but I still feel no regret having switched to Bluehost, for I know that they are more reliable and at least, they can speak proper English!
First of all, a few words, so that I make sure that Google catches them well: zighost, also known as 1uhost, sucks! Avoid 1uhost at all costs! Stay away from 1uhost! Why? Just read the following...
My homepage was suddenly suspended last week, showing a dreadful 404 error message. Before that, the server was just down for all users, so I was just assuming that they were in the process of restoring data for my account, but after a couple of days, I finally asked my webhost (zighost - I am not putting a link on purpose in order not to make it go up in google's ranking system) about it.
I was answered that I had some cgi scripts taking too much system resources. Or at least, this is what I could understand from the message, written in a such an approximate English, that it could have meant about anything.
Right. The only cgi script I have is blosxom, a simple perl script which browses text files in the UNIX file system, that I use for this weblog. Apart from that, I'm also using Gallery, a simple php gallery, widely used on the Internet. However, you won't find any forum, any shopping cart, any chat system on this homepage: just the minimum one needs to make a homepage.
On top of that, access to my account was just not possible, neither by ssh nor through the cpanel. Kind of amusing, when I was nicely prompted to fix this issue. "You must fix this", as they said. Well, I can't really help if you don't give me access to my account! I also requested more details about the actual culprit but didn't get any answer for a while. After sending several messages to the Helpdesk Center, I finally obtained access to my account again, with another nice message "Your site unsespended.Please fix immediately".
I took notice of the warning, but instead, the thing I immediately did was to download a full backup of my homepage, thinking that if my account was suspended again, at least, I'd have all files available to switch to another webhost. What happened next tells me that I showed wisdom in doing so. Anyway, I wanted to show good will, so I started checking what I could remove, so I:
- Disabled the slideshow feature of the gallery, which was said to be CPU potentially intensive
- Decreased the number of posts showed in the weblog to 5
- Reduced the frequency of the crontabs
In spite of those precautions, my account got suspended again 2 days after the changes, again with a very nice reply to my message to the support team:
Hi,
It has been necessary for us to suspend the account 'shiromi', monopolises and hard use system resources.
If you have a solution to this problem please do let me know reactivate the account, if not, I will remove the account totally at the end of the week without refund.If you require any additional information or we can be of any further assistance please do not hesitate to contact us.
Kind Regards,
1UHOST Abuse Team
At this point, I knew it was time to think about another provider. My choice went to Bluehost, a webhost which won the Best New Host Award in 2003, featuring everything that others provide, plus ssh access, 2Gb of disk space and 75Gb of bandwidth, everything for approximately the same price as competitors.
In the meantime, I requested more information to zighost/1uhost about the cause of the problem, knowing that I am likely not to get any constructive answer. They just disabled my account because they intended to do so andit seems there is nothing I can do about it, except warning people not to go for zighost or 1uhost (there may be other aliases, but those are the ones I know of). I should actually have suspected something when I noticed that all customers were hosted on the same physical machine, along with the website of the company... Afterwards, I also found some very bad criticisms on various forums about that webhost, among which, my favorite one is:
www.1UHOST.com
Actually, I'll allow myself to make one attack on a host - this one. Easy to fall for, but if you do - simply forget about the service and money invested. If your site starts generating lots of traffic, the site will be suspended and good luck getting someone e-mailing you back. Based on my own investigation, the company is pure fraud, founded and operated by some kid in Turkey.
One-bad-spelling-and-grammar-sentence-replies is what you will get. Guaranteed.
And the reply from 1uhost:
You sad;
"Based on my own investigation, the company is pure fraud, founded and operated by some kid in Turkey."
Our company is really company at hosting endustry.An TEKNOLINE INTERNET company.And we have valid tax office and number and we have registered company in Turkey.Our based office in Turkey and our company registered in Turkey.And, our datacenters are in USA.We have changed servers to excellent support and quality datacenter now.We datacenter name is NAC now.This datacenter is high quality and premium datacenter.
Your site suspended, becouse, you violated to our AUP.And, we give you all your money.
Have a nice day
No comments... Just stay away from 1uhost and any of their aliases! Resolve the IP address of the webhost, and if it matches 69.72.228.218 (their current IP address), add the webhost to your blacklist.
For those who may have not noticed that little change in this website, I have removed the guestbook, as it had become too popular to spammers and not enough to real fans of this website...
It was taking me way too much time to remove those fake congratulations
messages pointing to commercial sites.
On top of that, my guestbook got hacked recently, which made me realize how
vulnerable that kind of php pages can be for the whole website itself.
The guy who did that had the great idea to delete all previous messages and put an offensive one instead, I won't even mention what was said, that would be too much of an honour for such kind of people.
I am happy to make this website simpler and simpler, but I feel sorry about my friends, who left nice messages that are now lost forever.
It is not the first time this website is hacked, but last time, the hacker was just doing it for the challenge and had made an archive of the whole website before defacing it, so that I could recover the lost page.
As this part of the Internet dies, I'd like to proudly announce the birth
of a much more worthy one: the blog of my
friend Seb.
This blog is so active, it will just take a few weeks before it reaches the
same number of entries as mine!
I've finally updated the look of my homepage, which was getting kind of old fashioned, although I'm not sure I can qualify the new one as fashionable!
I went for brighter colors, used the picture of the sunflower I took a few months ago, played a little with Photoshop... et voila!
I'm quite happy with the effect of the petals smoothly fading away, but I'm sure there are still things that I will want to change in the next few days...
Oh, and I've made this change available for Windows IE users: the last change already included brighter colors but was still a temporary one, so I did not bother updating the CSS for IE.
I'm still using the same trick to make he most of the browsers: two parts in the css, one for IE which cannot understand all features, and a more complete one for W3C compliant browsers (all except Windows IE!).
I have just installed awstats which provides nice web reports about my site's
activity.
The configuration was easier than I thought and it's actually very easy to
use
Plus, I really like the way it looks, much more than the Webalizer available
through the Control Panel of my provider (which prevents me from giving access
to it to my visitors).
The only drawback: I'm now not the only one to notice how low the activity actually is! ;-)
I finally switched from rcthost to
another provider called zighost, after
rcthost froze my homepage for more than day, after I had allegedly exceeded my
bandwidth quota.
I knew my homepage grew in popularity recently, but I was still amazed I could
use so much bandwidth in such a short amount of time so I opened a ticket at
their helpdesk, but they just closed it immediately after, claiming that they
haven't heard of any problem of that kind... hmmm...
In order to bring back my site online, I upgraded my package and bought additional bandwdith: 1Gb for $10 (actually, I had another 1Gb for free, withe promotional offer: what a bargain...) and it took about 36 hours to process that order.
The next month, I looked at the bandwidth utilization and it was already up
to 480Mb within 4 days!
This time, there was no doubt, there must have been a mistake in their quota
program, especially when looking at the statistics, the sum of the bandiwdth
usage for each day didn't exceed 60Mb!
I reopened the ticket, with the same claim about the bandwidth and "just" two
weeks later, I finally got a reply from the helpdesk: "ok, it is fixed now".
Case closed.
Yeah right, tell me about 7/24 helpdesk... What about the previous month? What about the $10 I paid to purchase bandwidth I didn't use? Why isn't the bandwidth usage reset to zero, since they acknowledged there was a problem?
Zighost may be a smaller provider,
however their service is so much better than rcthost's: I now get 700Mb of
disk space, 30Gb of bandwidth, the server's CPU is not loaded so the webstats
are updated everyday and above all, SSH is allowed!
My account was setup with a few hours, it took them less than 30 minutes to
enable SSH and they're fast and reliable (the uptime is so far higher than
anything I could ever get with rcthost!).
Anyway, I've been very satisfied with their service so far and shell access
is sweet!
I was able to work directly on the server, writing csh and perl scripts to
convert all my pages to valid XHTML
strict 1.1.
There may be one or two pages with some mistakes I didn't check, but most of
them should be ok. I know that Bruno won't miss a chance to let me know which
ones are not valid, so I'll just let him find them and I'll correct them
then!
I have made minor visual changes in the design of my homepage, however, I
believe this prepares the work for more important changes to come.
Indeed, after my last post, I looked at what you could do with css files again
and again and I am still impressed by the flexibility css files can provide to
a website.
As for the changes in themselves, I have removed the logo and the counter
from the banner, feeling that they were not really needed after all. Above
all, they were pure images inserted in the html code, which makes them
difficult to change, unless you go to every single page and modify the code
(this is what I actually had to do this time, with a perl script though).
I have also replaced the png file for the shiromi title by a jpg picture,
which is now properly displayed by Internet Explorer. More importantly,
instead of a picture in the html code, I've made it a non-repeating background
of a div placed in the banner :)
Practically, it means that the common layout of my homepage (the frame, the banner, the background pictures, etc.) is entirely managed by this single file.
I'm currently working on a new design which will be applied everywhere at
once. You can have a glimpse of it in Shiromi's diary,
selecting the alternate StyleSheet, if your browser allows you to do so.
If you don't have such browser, I've made a special flavour
to view it.
I've used the flower from the css zen garden that I find very cool, but I'll need to find my own background picture before I use this new template.
By the way, the Complex Spiral is another demonstration of what is possible with css designing. Note that this will be truly impressive only if you use a browser that respects the standards of W3C (obviously, not IE!).
For those of you who are lucky enough (or just non-Microsoft enough) to use
a browser (Mozilla
Firebird is one of them...) that is capable of switching css profiles, you
can view another version of this weblog by switching to another css file
instead of using the default one.
It is still very simple, as I am just playing around to see what I can do but
as soon as it starts looking good, I'll think about replacing the old
version.
This feature in mozilla is so useful, it helps me work on a new design of
my homepage without interfering with the "production" version!
The content won't change though, only the way things are organized and the
background pictures do...
There are just so many things you can do with CSS, it's just amazing... If you want
to need a better picture of what css can do, check the css Zen garden
page and try the different
designs.
If you look carefully, you'll notice that the html code is the same, the css
file is the only difference. You can even submit your own design!
I have requested netcraft to
monitor the server which is hosting my website.
They can do that for free and the information they provide is actually quite
useful, drawing a graph of uptime and giving information about the version of
the http server running, etc.
The only constraint is that you have to request the information on a regular basis, or else, they'll stop polling the server.
I will use it to check whether rcthost, my hosting server, is reliable
enough, although I already have my opinion on this...
There have just been too many problems recently such as wrong data on the
statistics, which can lead to exceeding your quota on bandwidth, compelling
you to upgrade your account, unless you want to leave your website inactive
for the rest of the month, frequent reboots, license of the cpanel expiring,
preventing you from managing your website, etc.
Anybody has a good suggestion for a hosting server, please let me know... I'm looking for a Unix/Linux server allowing ssh and all the usual stuff (php, MySql, Advanced Guestbook, etc.).
It seems my homepage has been quite popular lately. At least, the amount of
bandwidth used has increased like crazy.
In the first 10 days of July, I had already used more than 1Gb of bandwidth.
As a result, my site was unavailable for a little more than a day.
Looking at the stats, it seems that my Fashion show pages were the most visited pages recently. However, I can also see more and more requests from search engines such as Google, Goo (a Japanese search engine) or All the web, which also shows that the rank of my homepage is growing in Google :).
I have upgraded my bandwidth from 1Gb to 3Gb, I hope that's going to be enough for now to handle the number of requests but I may be moving my website to another server soon...
