The Web: A Romance

The following are mostly boring techy details.

Blogger, SFTP, and DNS records

What an exciting 24 hours it has been!

I wrote a post the other day and Blogger failed to push it to kosmokaryote's server. That's alright. I'll try again later. I did try again later, and it still failed. Adventure time!

I have been aware that they were encouraging users to no longer use the SFTP service. While it's nice to have them as an interface to manage files that are remotely stored on my own server, I can kind of see the benefit. It takes up my bandwidth for them to update and copy files to my space. In particular, publishing can take a long time when I use labels, because they also update each label's static HTML page that they then transfer over. If I let them host it on their server, it could all be done dynamically. Yay. I could also have access to cool layout options (if I wanted, but I like my template). Sadly, I want it to be within my domain (kosmokaryote.org), not on theirs (blogspot.com). They at some point allows a method where you could use your own domain, directing it to their server, having the best of both worlds.

I made the change to my DNS records yesterday to point blog.kosmokaryote.org to their server, and today it's finally propagated through the various DNS servers such that going to blog.kosmokaryote.org for me now works as expected. If you're reading this later than I posted it, and were getting 404 pages, then your local DNS server didn't have the updated entry pointing blog.kosmokaryote.org to them and you're confused. Good luck!

Of course, there are various pointers on the web to pages hosted under www.kosmokaryote.org/blog/ (instead of the new blog.kosmokaryote.org). Google feeds (I have two subscribers, incidentally; go Google for including that in their feed-fetcher's user agent string) and old images and files and etc. I don't want all those to go stale. (I might forever lose my two subscribers!) So, to that end, I have made love to the .htaccess files of Apache, and now redirect any attempts to go below kosmokaryote.org/blog/ to blog.kosmokaryote.org (yay me).

The only issue right now is the extra space at the top. Perhaps that's blogger's navbar breaking somehow? Maybe it doesn't like my javascript header?

Gender Guesser, Perl, CGI, PHP

Consuming more of my time than an .htaccess file and a DNS record change (and various relative-to-absolute paths in javascript and CSS files) has been an effort to write a simple CGI script. You see, my girlfriend got development time as part of her birthday gift, and one of the things she wanted was a web repo to store Gender Guesser Q&A sets in. Being a little familiar with Perl and CGI scripting, and having CGI advertised with my host provider, I went to work.

Naturally, none of my test scripts nor the provided example scripts worked. Instead, I constantly received the dreaded Premature end of script headers. If you google around for solutions, you'll find a lot of ways in which the script could mess up, and a couple ways in which the server messes up my script. This was one of the latter, with the specific case being incorrect permissions and privileges for/with the dreaded suexec module.

I'll say right now that Chris Parrinello of webschwerver.com web hosting is awesome/special/amazing/cool and spent what seemed like a good deal of his own time attending to my issue. Various restarts and tests and attempts later, tada, CGI scripting works!

Sadly, for all that effort, I did end up writing my uploader and repository in PHP as he suggested at one point. PHP, consequently, is my new favourite web development language. I like both it and JavaScript. I never really liked Perl to begin with, you see. I just got used to it. I had settled for what I knew. It sure is versatile at least. You can always say that for Perl... ugly as hell though. Makes my hair fall out. Wouldn't invite it to a party. Well, sure I would, but it's more out of pity. Sure is ugly... right, PHP: Pretty Handsome & Parsable.

Anyway, playing with PHP has been fun. No, you cannot use the uploader. Not until you request permission, at least. Why would you? I haven't really even made the Gender Guesser code very public yet. Oh, I will. I'm just lazy, you see. Don't hassle me! I want to finish a few things first. Like the Set Creator GUI! Did you know, I wrote a handy application to help you create the sets you use in Gender Guesser? It's written in Vala. (On the note of languages, I might also be getting over my C#/Mono bigotry, not that I'm much of a bigot on that front to begin with, but I never want to use Mono...) The only issue is that it saves it in the CSV format and I want XML. I also want it to be able to open existing sets and let you edit and resave them. All coming along now, you see.

You can, however, view the repository of sets: here

Now, to learn more LaTeX so I can finally create a decent CV.