Martin Geisler Online

I was wondering: are you guys reading my site online, or are you using of the feeds that are available (RSS 0.92, RSS 2.0, and Atom)? I’m asking because I’ve never used those features myself… For example, what are the differences between the three feeds (more/less information)?

After the migration to mgeisler.net I’ve been busy updating links on my site, and also a bit outsite whenever I found them. While doing so I thought a bit about how the current link structure of the Web works, or rather how it doesn’t always work.

For example: After I started redirecting people using standard HTTP “301 Moved Permanently” headers, smart search engines such as Google automatically updated their links to point to mgeisler.net. I wish that kind of auto-updating links were implemented more often!

The basic problem is that content sometimes more around in Cyberspace, so links need to be updatable. Of course one can just go through all links by hand and update them — and I’ve also partly done so, with the help of some SQL of course.

But the real solution is some kind of indirection. To make it easier for myself to do exactly that I’ve decided to seed the list of links in [PHP Markdown][] with a bunch of often used links. This means two things

1. I can easily change all links to, say, [PHP][] if the needed be. I might decide one day that I would like to have a page here at mgeisler.net describing PHP, with links to my tutorial and other PHP related projects I’m involved in.

   (Hint: I’ve had exactly such a page back in an old version of gimpster.com, and I’ve now been updating lots of stale links pointing to /php/index.php. So the example is very real…)

2. I can make lots of links very conveniently, knowing that they are predefined with a correct URL and title. I can, for example, write something about [Emacs][] and make a link by writing ...something about [Emacs][] and making…. Simple isn’t it?

The seeding is very simple: I’ve just changed the initialization of $md_urls and $md_titles from empty arrays to arrays with the content I want. So for example with

$md_urls = array('gnu' => 'http://www.gnu.org/');
$md_titles = array('gnu' => 'GNU's Not Unix!');

I can afterwards link to the [GNU homepage][GNU] using reference links with gnu as the link label. Just remember that the labels are converted into lower-case before being used — this means that writing [GNU][] works as expected because the label GNU is converted into gnu and then used to lookup the URL and title.

The changes must be made in the beginning of the Markdown function, about 13% into markdown.php.

So, they’ve released version 1.5.1 of [WordPress][]. Better go get it while it’s hot!

I’ve been using the [SVN][] version of WordPress ever since I lunched mgeisler.net and I like it. So far I haven’t had any of the previous spam problems with this version for example, which is very nice!

So far the new version has been downloaded 2,653 times — the last version was downloaded an astonishing 207,981 times! Now that’s many…! Go help them bring that number up!

Yesterday I went with the rest of Stéphanie’s family to hear the yearly concert by the Harmonie Stalden. It was good! Hearing music live is always a great experience, but to see 50 people playing together in such a smooth way is fantastic. I’ve never been able to understand exactly how the director controls the music — everything seems to go by itself — but I think he did a good job yesterday.

As did all the sololists! The first sololist was on trumpet, and he was great, but I was most excited about the solo by Stéphanie. She played the heavy footsteps of an elephant with her double bass, going “dum-dum dum-dum”. I know it’s silly to write how music sounds, but try to imagine a big elephant in a circus walking around, and it will make a “dum-dum” like sound :-)

I published my first piece of news on by old site gimpster.com five years ago today. I guess it will only be the true old-timers (of which I can only think of Kristian and my dad) who remembers this :-)

Back then I ran gimpster.com which were supposed to be a cool place with information about the GIMPS project. It since turned out that I had lots of other stuff to write about, and I quickly lost interest in the GIMPS forecast service I had planned.

Instead I keps publishing news about what happened and what interested me in my daily life. I also wrote a little tutorial on PHP one day, a script to get current weather information, and placed other more or less interesting (Danish) things online.

That seemed to work quite nicely — people came to visit and were quite happy I think. Or at least my guestbook told me so.

Of course people also sent me suggestions and told me about problems on my site. Now, being the idealist I am and generally interested in new technologies, I switched my site to a WikiWikiWeb running on [PhpWiki][]. That was really nice, for now I could create new pages very easily, and people could fix my spelling errors when they found them. The PhpWiki project is a very active one, and Reini Urban (the main coder) is very talented. Their parser is without doubt the most advanced parser I’ve seen.

So with such killer-software, why would I then switch to [WordPress][]? Because my PhpWiki installation stopped working without warning sometime between Christmas and New Years Eve 2004. The reason was that my — what would be a nice way of putting it? — progressive webhosting company NETsite decided to upgrade to [PHP][] 5. Now don’t get me wrong, I love PHP 5, it’s a much needed improvement over the mess that is PHP 4. I would just have preferred if NETsite would have given its customers a little warning first instead of just upgrading.

When I call PHP 4 a mess, I’m talking about the lack of a clear object-oriented model using reference assignment as the default. Value assignment (a shallow copy is made, I believe) just doesn’t work — and to enable reference assignment you would have to springle your code with lots of & all over the place, and just hope that you haven’t forgotten one.

With PHP 5 my installation of PhpWiki broke. I believe new versions of PhpWiki will run on PHP 5, but since I had modified my (slightly old…) version a bit here and a bit there I couldn’t just upgrade. A couple of weeks went by until I one day in February decided to try WordPress. Despite some initial complains about parse errors with Markdown and problems with special characters, I stuck with WordPress because of it’s blogging facilities. For even though I had a WikiWikiWeb running on my site, I still mostly used my site for publishing news about my life. So a proper blog seems to be what I need, and especially now that I’m in Switzerland so that I can tell people back home how it is here.

Now when I’ve converted the wiki content I will have a complete coverage of the last five years of my life. It’s not that everything in my life is reflected here online, but a significant part is, I guess. Oh, the nostalgia!

Well — see you guys in five years time!