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revford blog
Shots do not hurt other players (yet)
New Icon for Web News
Wed, 24 Sep 2008 21:51:22 GMT
As I'm on a new icons roll, here is my new Web code and news icon, based on the famous GPL'ed Deer Park Globe.
As per the licence, my edit remains available to anyone to use under the LGPL, GPL or MPL licences. See here for details.
Code News Icon
Tue, 23 Sep 2008 10:05:23 GMT
Following on my new icons kick, while I'm feeling rough still. This time a new icon for the general topic of Code. That is source code, scripts, programs and the like, not secret codes, cyphers and cryptography.
Nice and simple, I wanted gears or cogs. So back to Wikimedia Commons to look for some public domain cogs.
Image:Cog-scripted-svg.svgPerfect.
And so, we get these.
Perl Icon
Tue, 23 Sep 2008 02:55:08 GMT
I've been trying to fine-grain the subject icons on the site recently, with a view to later creating a way of sorting posts by subject. This is a way off yet and shouldn't be too hard to code once I get around to it.
Back closer to the topic, I wanted to add icons for the different kinds of code I write, those being mostly Perl and Javascript. Thinking this would be simplest, I started with Perl.
The obvious thing was to use the Camel.
Well, no, it turns out that the use of the Camel, in reference to Perl is the IP of O'Reilly, who publish The Camel Book, one of the standard texts on Perl.
O'Reilly have published some, well, overly strict guidelines on the use and formatting of the Camel logo here.
Usage Guidelines for the Programming Republic of Perl Logo
The part that makes this most useless to me, is the fact I can't resize it or colour it to match my site.
The fact I have to make any use of it a link back to perl.com doesn't help either.
The other known icon for Perl is the Onion, this however is the IP of The Perl Foundation. They also have a page of rules governing the use of the Onion.
Similar guidelines here, requiring that the logo link back to perl.org this time.
Which is a shame, as it basically means I can't use either.
So, I've been out and looked for an image I can work with, that doesn't infringe on the logos, icons, trademarks or any other kind of IP of either O'Reilly or The Perl Foundation, but still suggests Perl to me and others.
Wikimedia Commons to the rescue, a search for camels found me this public domain image of a Camel Skeleton.
It is public domain and very clearly not the O'Reilly Camel. Due to it's skeletal nature.
So, the Bare Bones icon. For my simple Perl coding projects.
New Roleplay Icon
Mon, 22 Sep 2008 13:53:33 GMT
As I liked the new gaming icon so much, also because I'm ill in bed and bored, here is a new icon for Roleplay news.
I started with a clearer photo of a d10.
Some GIMPing later I had these. Some crop, contrast, brightness, colourise, and background removal later.
New Icon for Gaming News
Sun, 21 Sep 2008 17:07:33 GMT
A bit of gimping has come up with a new gaming news icon. The old Inquisitor has been replaced with a D6. It just seems more in theme to me, following on from the D10 I use for Roleplay stuff.
It all started with a photo of a D6 I took on the painting table.
A quick flick of the GIMP and we get these.
A D6, because most tabletop games are based on them, while roleplay games more commonly use weird shapes.
Stats, corrected
Mon, 15 Sep 2008 17:06:33 GMT
Stats eh? Well, it looks like the "this weeks" stats I had were wrong. I'd made a sorting error that was giving me an almost random seven days, instead of the last seven.
That will teach me to reuse old code without double checking what it does. :)
Hits by Browser
| IE 7 hits | 14% | 472 |
| IE 6 hits | 40% | 1281 |
| Firefox hits | 27% | 895 |
| Safari hits | 14% | 457 |
| Opera hits | 0% | 21 |
The new order puts Opera down to it's expected traffic level.
IE and Firefox and Safari gain slightly as a result, the foul IE6 getting a giant leap.
Users by OS
| WinXP users | 55% | 89 |
| Vista users | 11% | 19 |
| MacOS users | 4% | 7 |
Windows dominance slips down to a combined 66%, but it's still Windows XP that towers over everything.
Usage stats for the week
Sun, 14 Sep 2008 13:32:17 GMT
Everyone loves stats, so here is the breakdown of site traffic for the last week.
Hits by Browser
| Firefox hits | 24% | 1141 |
| IE 7 hits | 38% | 1809 |
| IE 6 hits | 15% | 743 |
| Safari hits | 7% | 365 |
| Opera hits | 12% | 605 |
Internet Explorer continues to dominate the browser share, with 53%. At least the fairly poor IE7 is gaining against the dreadful IE6.
Safari for Windows doesn't seem to have been very popular, I only seem to get a hit from Safari for Windows once a month, if that. Most Safari users are Mac users sticking to the default browser, much as IE users are for Windows.
I've yet to see a single hit from Google Chrome.
Opera remains a popular choice. Most places I see Opera as listed less than 1%, but I usually see between 10% and 15% here. No doubt it's an excellent browser with strong standards support and wide compatibility. Strange here should get such a large share of Opera users.
Users by OS
| WinXP users | 70% | 408 |
| Vista users | 8% | 47 |
| MacOS users | 5% | 31 |
Windows is so far ahead it's not even funny, 78% Windows and 5% Mac, leaving 17% others.
Website Usage Stats
Thu, 04 Sep 2008 13:29:34 GMT
Always of interest to me is the share of Browsers and OSs that access the site. Based on this I can plan changes to the site that best fit the way people access it.
Here is the current usage share of my site, it should update daily with the last 30 days of traffic and OS by percentage.
It's 51% Internet Explorer, 24% Firefox, 16% Opera and 5% Safari in the browser count. On the OS count, it's 82% Windows, 6% Mac.
New Background Pattern
Sat, 17 May 2008 20:20:13 GMT
Playing about with the GIMP, came up with this.
Generated by the Land script, then played about with to soften and dull it down.
Web Stats
Fri, 18 Apr 2008 18:15:46 GMT
I've been playing around again with perl scripts to parse web log files, this time creating a breakdown by browser and platform so I can see what I need to be supporting.
Gauntlet II quotes script updated
Sat, 12 Apr 2008 16:13:00 GMT
The random Gauntlet II quotes script used on the pages has been updated with more exciting variants.
Click on the quote at the bottom of the page for all new adventure.
Grab the code here:
gauntlet2.js
CSS tweaks, changes to the site style
Sun, 06 Apr 2008 01:15:52 GMT
Just trying to freshen up the look of the site, switched from a tile to a plain background for now. This will keep changing about for a few days until I get something I'm really happy with.
Gauntlet II babble
Tue, 11 Mar 2008 15:34:40 GMT
Political ranting over for a while, we now return to the usual Nerd content. :-}=
For some reason I've had "Yellow Wizard shot the food!" stuck in my head, so quickly bashed together some javascript to generate Gauntlet II babble. It's been added to the site so it should appear in little italic text at the foot of each page, next to the Creative Commons symbol.
Click the text to generate new babble.
If you want to add it to your own page, or just like to look at code, it's available here:
sitebuild-log-check updated
Sun, 09 Mar 2008 15:06:02 GMT
Updated the log checker, sitebuild-log-check to give me a breakdown of the OS being used, as well as the browser.
Currently it counts Windows XP, Windows Vista, Mac OS X and Linux/Unix users.
Stats so far are very heavily weighted to Windows XP, Mac OS next, then Vista and Linux/X11 users are as rare as hen's teeth.
The rest of sitebuild-update, updated
Sun, 02 Mar 2008 17:50:15 GMT
The rest of the sitebuild-update scripts now updated. Stripping file extensions from post filenames used to create the links from the RSS to the HTML.
sitebuild-update-rss updated
Sun, 02 Mar 2008 16:58:43 GMT
Update to sitebuild-update-rss, a typo was causing the links to be incorrectly added to the RSS feed.
All sorted now.
Sitebuild scripts updated
Thu, 28 Feb 2008 18:32:03 GMT
I've been using an updated version of the site building scripts recently, all seems to work fine so here is the new version.
There are two shell scripts that I run, either sitebuild-update for just the blog, index and RSS feed. Or sitebuild-total for the whole site.
Either script then uses ncftpput to upload the files.
These call the actual working scripts, written in Perl.
The three files sitebuild-update-* each build a different page using the blog posts. sitebuild-update-html is complete blog archive page, update-log. sitebuild-update-index is the main page here. sitebuild-update-rss is the RSS news feed.
sitebuild-contfiles creates all the other pages here, by adding the headers, scripts, CSS and metadata to a set of template files.
In addition, I've added a log file checker. Again a combination of Shell and Perl scripts.
sitebuild-log calls two scripts, first a shell script, sitebuild-log-grab, then a perl one, sitebuild-log-check.
The shell script downloads the log files using ncftpget, then uses gzip to extract them. After that, it's over to the perl script.
sitebuild-log-check tries to get some helpful or at least interesting info about the usage of the site, it uses a perl module to do whois lookups so I can see where in the world the visitors are, then tells me about browser usage, which search engines and other robots are visiting and if I'm getting any 404 errors. The whois isn't perfect, but gets most addresses.
It did show me a mountain of 404s, which I quickly found were looking for favicon.ico and robots.txt, so adding them solved most errors. The others were links to older pages or pages and images that have been removed.
The script also removes information about images linked from the forums I post on, as for stats I'm only interested in people who actually visit this site, not look at my posted images on another.
Most worrying error seems to be that there are people out using Windows Vista (aka NT 6.0), Also there are some people out there using Windows 98 still.
Along with that, there are lots of people using IE6. When there is no good reason to.
Advice:
- If you're using IE6, upgrade to Firefox. It's free and much, much safer.
- If you're using Windows 98 or Vista, upgrade to Linux. It's free and much, much safer.
Get Firefox
Get Ubuntu LinuxHere is an example day's output:
Results for Tue, 26 Feb 2008 22 unique human IPs with 221 dupes. 208.111.154.15 - - [] 75.170.177.133 - - [] 63.167.255.155 - - [] 195.93.60.67 - US - AOL Inc [AOL International Operations, Europe] 195.93.60.68 - US - AOL Inc [AOL International Operations, Europe] 195.93.60.69 - US - AOL Inc [AOL International Operations, Europe] 195.93.60.74 - US - AOL Inc [AOL International Operations, Europe] 195.93.60.70 - US - AOL Inc [AOL International Operations, Europe] 193.130.15.240 - GB - PIPEX-BLOCK1 [UK PA route] 200.238.68.114 - - [%The use of the data below is only permitted as ibed in] 78.150.43.198 - GB - Opal Telecommunications Internet Service Provider [Opal-Net Autonomous System] 195.140.123.22 - DE - SI-NORD-NET1 [Sparkassen Informatik GmbH Muenster] 90.45.138.11 - FR - [BSBOR257 Bordeaux Bloc 2] 198.241.217.15 - - [] 209.226.225.16 - - [] 79.145.172.19 - ES - Provider Local Registry [RIMA (Red IP Multi Acceso)] 86.150.70.200 - GB - IP pools [BT Public Internet Service] 66.249.84.69 - - [] 81.108.176.98 - GB - NTL-UK-IP-BLOCK [NTL-UK-IP-BLOCK] 66.249.84.67 - - [] 86.162.210.216 - GB - IP pools [BT Public Internet Service] 71.196.40.60 - - [] 11 different browsers. Firefox hits 55 Explorer hits 137 Safari hits 0 Opera hits 0 Mozilla/5.0 X11; U; Linux i686 x86_64; en-US; rv:1.8.1.11 Gecko/20080109 Charlotte/0.9t; http://www.searchme.com/support/ Mozilla/4.0 compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322 Mozilla/4.0 compatible; MSIE 7.0; AOL 9.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322 Mozilla/5.0 Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.8.1.12 Gecko/20080201 Firefox/2.0.0.12 Mozilla/4.0 compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0 Mozilla/5.0 Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; fr; rv:1.8.1.12 Gecko/20080201 Firefox/2.0.0.12 Mozilla/4.0 compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0; Mozilla/4.0 compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1 ; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; Media Center PC 5.0; .NET CLR 3.0.04506; .NET CLR 1.1.4322 Mozilla/5.0 Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; ca; rv:1.8.1.12 Gecko/20080201 Firefox/2.0.0.12 Mozilla/4.0 compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; YPC 3.2.0; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; Media Center PC 4.0; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.30; yplus 5.3.04d Mozilla/4.0 compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; .NET CLR 1.1.4322 Mozilla/4.0 compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; Media Center PC 3.0; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; .NET CLR 1.1.4322 4 different robots. msnbot/1.1 http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm Mozilla/5.0 compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp Mozilla/5.0 compatible; Ask Jeeves/Teoma; http://about.ask.com/en/docs/about/webmasters.shtml Mozilla/5.0 compatible; Googlebot/2.1; http://www.google.com/bot.html 1 404 errors.
Less JS, more offline scripted building
Mon, 11 Feb 2008 14:34:02 GMT
More behind the scenes updates to how the site works. The page title, which CSS is needed, metadata and scripts are now added to the pages with a script run on my machine, leaving less for deco.js to do.
This maintains, even improves, site coding simplicity for me and requires less work for the client end. This means pages should load faster.
The Perl that makes it work is here, sitebuild-update-contfiles. The contfiles it talks about are the content of the pages, in basic HTML, leaving out the head, body, html doctype etc.
Tiki! Tiki! Tiki!
Sat, 09 Feb 2008 15:24:39 GMT
Just some of our Tiki Mugs. Also a new icon for a new "Booze" category.
Updated the Islanders game page
Mon, 04 Feb 2008 13:25:06 GMT
Now the big symbol on the Islanders D&D game page is clickable, to get a new random symbol.
Saves hitting refresh all the time to change it hammering the server.
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