For some unfathomable reason, I’m thinking about resurrecting the Musicwhore.org artist directory. That thing was a pain in the butt to maintain, and it burned me out.
So why bring it back? Well, this time around, I have no intention of maintaining it. That is, I’m not going to spend my spare time doing data entry.
Rather, I want the directory to be powered by Musicbrainz.
This mirror of an article describes how to aggregate and collate RSS and Atom feeds with MagpieRSS. It’s really effective, but in following the steps exactly laid out, you lose channel information. When you want to distinguish between different feeds, you may want to include the basics, such as title (the name of the site) and link (the base url of the site.)
So I devised a bit of a hack to append that information to the items array.
I’m a dweeb for finding this amusing, but in the office, I’ll sometimes have Mozilla’s JavaScript Console open to debug scripts I’m working on.
My ALT+TAB switching occasionally brings me to the console instead of my browser, and I get a quick shock at the number of debugging errors that popped into the console just from random web surfing.
I’ll think “tsk tsk” when I see the errors but the remember the whole glass houses thing — I’m sure my sites generate their own errors. (In fact, Movable Type seems to be generating some errors itself. Hmm …)
Dreamhost sets the annoying PHP configuration value session.use_trans_sid to true by default. That means the first time you visit a site hosted on Dreamhost using PHP sessions, the session ID is appended to the links in your page as a query string.
Not only does this make URLs ugly as hell, but it makes me uneasy thinking a user’s session ID — which is used to store information usually handled by cookies — is plastered all over a page.
Since I can’t edit Dreamhost’s php.ini file, I have to handle the configuration on my end. I run PHP as a CGI, so using ini_set to configure session.use_trans_sid or editing .htaccess won’t work.
But this very helpful article suggests using ini_set("url_rewriter.tags","") instead. Well, it works! No more ugly URLs!
Although I should probably be proactive and e-mail Dreamhost support to tell to turn the damn configuration value off.
At work today, I was testing some JavaScript code on Netscape 4.8 — yeah, I know who uses Netscape 4.x? — when it occurred to me to test the same code on old versions of Internet Explorer.
Of course, that meant a jump on Google to find “Internet Explorer 4“, which lead me to browsers.evolt.org. Oh. My.
Just when I thought I couldn’t find another reason to love Firefox …
Animated GIF ads were bad enough in 1996, but Flash ads? So much evil is committed with Flash, it’s really, really tough not to blame the tool.
But a search for “block flash ad mozilla” led me to the AdBlock extension. And what a wonderful extension it is. Now a useful albeit shitty site like Zap2It is much less annoying!
I can’t wait to use it on a Flash ad obnoxious enough to block content!
I don’t understand …
Back in April, when I suspended new user accounts for Musicwhore.org, I would comb my administrative logs to find people trying to access the audio files with random logins, or making password requests for accounts that don’t exist. Huh? What part of the phrase “Login failed” don’t you understand?
I can be such an asshole.
Some idiot in Asia decided to link to an image off of Musicwhore.org for his stupid BBS avatar. I have an .htaccess file in my images directory to block such links, but this dolt couldn’t take a hint. As a result, I got hundreds — a little more than a thousand, in fact — errors because of all those broken requests.
So I spent a good part of the day messing with the RewriteRule directive in Apache so it would return an entirely different image than the one this fucker expected. It took forever — damn can Apache be a pain in the ass sometimes — but I finally managed to return of picture of David James Elliott barechested.
(I had already tried one with a shirtless Dean Cain and another of Alton Brown. But my heart was set on a barechested DJE.)
At first, I redirected directly to another server, but I figured that was rude of me as well. So I rewrote the directive to point back to a dummy directory on Musicwhore.org. By the time I was ready to launch the new .htaccess file, the idiot changed his avatar to something other than an image on Musicwhore.org.
I win.
The moral of the story: don’t link to my fucking images, motherfucker.
(That asshat was lucky I didn’t point to pr0n.)
