I made a few minor changes behind-the-scenes here at Signifying Nothing:

1. I’ve added a new “Best of Signifying Nothing” sidebar on the front page; the main criterion for inclusion is that I find the post particularly interesting, although posts that got major linkage will receive consideration as well. It’s heavily biased toward wordy entries, but otherwise should be fairly eclectic in content.

2. The title of this weblog is now just “Signifying Nothing.”

3. I’ve fiddled with the stylesheet some more; the most notable change is that blockquotes now have changebars next to them and aren’t red/orange/whatever you’d call this color any more. The underlying markup has also become a bit more semantic again, since it seems like most browsers can style <H3> credibly. (I also took out some commented-out cruft.)

4. A lot of the backend code has been made more customizable, in preparation for another LSblog release. Before that happens, I’ll probably sit down and write the blogroll code (which means I may present a blogroll while I’m testing things, even though I’m still not sold on having one).

So, to the extent you notice the changes, I hope you like them!

Posting will be light through Sunday evening, for the following reasons:

1. I need to finish my Midwest paper.

2. The Red-Blue Game is this afternoon.

3. I still need to finish up the promised LSblog work behind-the-scenes (mainly on the admin interface). If you read the RSS feed, you may have already noted the Open Directory categories that are now associated with each entry; that’s one of the new under-the-hood features (particularly interesting if you're interested in aggregating this content—I'll post some thoughts on that soon).

More blogagge soon…

I skimmed a web design book at Barnes & Noble today that said you should underline your links. Rather than slavishly follow that advice, I've simply underlined the links in blog entries and left the rest alone. (The entry links are the most important ones to pick out, since they're buried in text. Underlining every link would be ugly.)

I also am experimenting with an alternate stylesheet that produces a “run-in” look like that used on a lot of Blogger blogs. If you have Mozilla or the Phoenix alternate stylesheet switcher plugin (it may also work in Camino™), you can play with it. You can also choose the so-called “serif look,” which uses a Serif font (like this) for entries. Unfortunately, these styles don't persist between page visits in Moz or Phoenix, so the usefulness is pretty limited for now.

Finally, behind the scenes, the front page is now moved over to a pure mod_python implementation using the Publisher handler. The main advantage (beyond a further speedup in the page rendering and cleaner code — no more fiddling with the FieldStorage class) is that it can properly deal with If-Modified-Since headers again; real CGIs did it automatically, but mod_python's CGI emulation doesn't handle them right for some odd reason. Still slouching toward a code release; the next step is to convert all the other backend scripts.

David Janes has added a new feature called ThreadTrack to Janes' Blogosphere; it's an excellent way to see what other weblogs are talking about the same topics, in a bit less linear a way than things like Technorati, BlogDex, and DayPop. Be sure to visit his site for details on how you can enable ThreadTrack in your blog; it's enabled here with the » (n) links you can see at the bottom of each entry.

Also, I've added some cool new stuff in the backend that won't be noticeable by most anyone except me; most notably, each entry is now being processed by Tidy to convert it to valid XHTML, which improves the new full-content feed via the RSS backend, to help aggregators.

Mark Pilgrim has an interesting post today on using rewrite rules to configure Apache to keep out nasty bots; if you run your own server, it's a must-read.

In order to be a good boy myself, I hacked up the trackback module in LSblog to obey robots.txt files, even though I'm not sure it's strictly necessary (the worst it can do is go two posts deep in a site: once to find a trackback URL, and once to access the URL). But, on the upside, it should stop some 403 errors with tracking back to Google.

Since I'm sort-of-iced-in (although the promised ice storm hasn't materialized here, I didn't feel like risking being stranded away from the house), I also moved LSblog to mod_python 3.0.1; it took some fiddling with RewriteRules to make it all work nicely. It's currently using the CGI emulation (which incidentally is buggy — apply this patch), although I'll probably move to the Publisher module eventually, mainly since it has a cooler interface. Currently both the main page and the RSS feed are being served via mod_python; it seems to have halved the page-load times. (There's still some icky database queries that have to be run each page-load; maybe eventually I'll stick a reverse caching proxy in front, if the load ever justifies it. But currently my load average is pegged at 1.00, so I'm in no hurry.)

Hmm. The whole "obey robots.txt" thing didn't work out as well as hoped; it seems we might want to access a cgi-bin directory, but robots are normally excluded from those. (I guess it boils down to a question of how autonomous a robot must be before it's a robot...)

Deeply strange hoodoo. There must be some wacky interaction between LSblog's trackback and Mark's tb.cgi; the comment count goes up, but the comments page doesn't get updated.

Apologies for the downtime today; blog.lordsutch.com has migrated to a new server.

The good news is that during the downtime I added an automatic ping to weblogs.com in LSblog's posting code, so now tools that leverage data from weblogs.com will see what's happening here. (The oft-promised public release of LSblog is still a little while off, though.)

I've been playing with the stylesheet a bit recently. The most visible change is probably the background on the sidebar, which should show up as a light gray (on my laptop's LCD, it actually has a bluish tint). I've also set the stylesheet to just use your default sans-serif font (which probably means Verdana or some Helvetica variant), rather than the first font it could find in the long list of possibilities that was there before. (You can also choose the Serif look in some browsers, but it doesn't seem to stick so it's not very useful at present.) Of course, you can override the stylesheet rules if you like. Also, there's a printing stylesheet that most recent browsers recognize; the main thing it does is remove the sidebar when printing.

As you may also have noticed, I've simplified the TrackBack links; they're the links to the right of the Permalink icon that look like « (X), where X is the number of trackbacks to that entry. (The link is bold if X is non-zero.)

Finally, I've debated about whether or not to post a blogroll. Since I wouldn't use it myself, the value to me would be minimal; plus, I'd rather not be in a position to be accused of “playing favorites.” There are plenty of great blogs out there, and you don't need me pointing you in the right direction. (I have put some links to some services I've found useful, however; GeoURL and Janes' Blogosphere are both neat tools that I recommend heartily.)

Another brief note: I've fiddled some with the headers of the pages, so Internet Explorer should finally understand that this blog is in UTF-8 encoding. Grrr.

blog.lordsutch.com is now syndicated via Janes' Blogosphere; however, David's code doesn't seem to understand the nuances of my markup. Until LSblog takes over the world by storm (don't hold your breath), don't expect to find the pretty links to stuff I talk about on other peoples' sites. (I tried to figure out what was special about the markup on other sites that helped Janes' pick things out, but gave up. Email me if you know what I need to do.)

Also, blog.lordsutch.com is registered at GeoURL, which is generating a fair amount of referral traffic.

The university computer network seems to be have been suffering from “return of students to their broadband connections”-itis this afternoon. But now, we're back and better than ever!

By the way, the flag at the top of the new title graphic is the Magnolia Flag, which was adopted as the first state flag in 1861, and continued to fly over the state until 1894 (until the current flag was first adopted). For a bit of history on Mississippi flags (up through 2000), see this article by noted Mississippi historian David Sansing.

David Sansing is not to be confused with noted Tennessee blogger Donald Sensing!.

Happy holidays from blog.lordsutch.com, on remote location via frequently-disconnecting dialup from butt-numbingly-cold Memphis, Tennessee, once home of my “opinionated” MemphisWatch website, before I moved to warmer climes (i.e. Oxford); MemphisWatch may have been a blog before anyone really knew what a blog was, including me.

Among my Christmas presents: a blogroll entry from Bill Hobbs. When I get around to coding the blogroll part of LSblog, I'll be sure to recpirocate.

Scare quote courtesy of the Memphis Commercial Appeal, who devoted a whole column inch to my site in 1998 or so. I still have the archives laying around at home, so I'll put them up over the weekend.

There apparently was a power outage this morning that took down the system that blog.lordsutch.com is hosted on. While it was down, I took the opportunity to replace the motherboard and CPU (upgraded from a P-III 450 to an Athlon 750) and upgrade the system memory (from 512 MB to 784 MB), since I had the spare parts laying around the house gathering dust anyway.

Kevin Canfield in today's Hartford Courant has a pretty good article on weblogs and the Lottroversy, including quotes from Josh Mitchell, Atrios, Jennifer Gray, and yours truly.

I updated the site this evening to the latest PostgreSQL and Apache releases. Hopefully there are no remaining bugs.

The next project will be to convert the blog over to use mod_python; it is currently a standard CGI.

Don't expect anything to show up here until sometime on Sunday... I'm too busy celebrating Ole Miss's 6-6 season :-/.

I've added a couple of extra default font names to the stylesheet and also provided an alternate stylesheet that uses serif fonts instead; hopefully this will fix the issues some have had with fonts. Also, I've added mod_gzip to this Apache installation to reduce the bandwidth requirement of the page (all the markup makes it clock in pretty big) and added a few tweaks to the generated HTML — the most important is that the last modified time of an entry is a now tooltip for the original posting time (the page is full of tooltips, in case you haven't noticed).

At some point, I should add some media stylesheets to remove the sidebar when printing. Not that you'd actually want to print this crap...

This is a bit of a pilot project to see if (a) Python and PostgreSQL do a decent job as a blog engine and (b) Chris can actually find enough to say to be worthy of having his own blog.

I'd wager on (a) but against (b), personally. :)

Incidentally, all of the layout here is CSS-based; Mozilla and its derivatives seem to cope fine, but some IE variants (notably, IE 5.2 for Mac OS X) seem to have some issues (which I'll try to sort out as I get a chance).