For the record, I am not a fan of WordPress. Mostly becuase it is a product that seems to always be victim to some new security vulnerability. However I now feel much more capable of staying on top of security updates than I ever have before. This is in large part due to having adopted GTD. (It should also be noted that if I could easily install and maintain Gyrobase on my VPS, I would use Foundation’s blogging module in a heartbeat.)

This blog entry also marks the renaming of my blog to “Ad Hoc”, from the far-too-plain “Eric’s Blog”. I chose this name after skimming my old Programming Language Pragmatics textbook. Considering it’s a term I often find myself using, and could easily apply to my blog posts, I figured it would fit quite well.

At it’s heart, it’s a tinyurl clone with heaps of JavaScript and AJAX sugar. But I’m hoping I’ll have the time to continue to add features to it, to make it more than just a clone of tinyurl. At the very least, it’ll be a place where I can store links to interesting sites so that I have a way of recalling them months later. (Bookmarks have never worked well for me.)

If you give a URL to the pixie, (and you’re using a browser other than IE 6), you’ll see an animation of pixie dust transform your URL into a short URL. What others may find interesting about this animation, is it’s relatively simple implementation. It doesn’t use <canvas> at all; it’s just a div, a transparent background PNG and a bit of JavaScript to change the background-position CSS property to point to different frames inside the PNG at short intervals. This works surprisingly well.

Perhaps a more naïve implementation would load each frame of the animation as a distinct image. (Or use an animated GIF instead of PNG, but the boolean transparency of GIF is a deal breaker.) This method however allows all the frames to be downloaded in one, ~150KB, shot. With a JavaScript preload of the image, it should be completely downloaded by the time the user submits the form and the animation needs to play.

One of the more interesting things I learned while doing this is that indexed color PNGs (PNG8) actually have support for a pseudo alpha channel! An RGBA-palette, as it’s called, where each color in the palette can also have an alpha value. For some reason, I had always thought that indexed PNGs were limited to boolean transparency the same way GIFs are. The Gimp gives this impression, as it doesn’t seem to be able to support anything more than boolean transparency in indexed color mode.

I doubt that there are many graphics packages that will save a PNG with an RGBA-palette. It’s a real shame, because with some proper optimization PNGs are can be made smaller than GIFs. If you’re interested in creating these types of PNGs you’ll likely need to use pngquant. And while we’re on the topic of optimizing PNGs, OptiPNG is a must.

Another side project I’ve been working on is unallocated.com. I’m not entirely sure what I’m going for with it, but currently it aims to tell you as much about your IP address as it possibly can. One of the recent additions is a bit of AJAX to allow for a much faster page load. Getting the reverse DNS, geolocation, and ARIN whois lookup of an IP all take too much time to hold up the downloading of the rest of the page. The AJAX additions allow parallel XMLHttpRequests to download the parts of the page that are too slow to do inline.

Unfortunately, there are some tricks necessary to get b2evolution 1.8.2 (Serenity) to work with the Blogging Bundle. The first is to understand how to specify your blog ID in the Blogging Bundle configuration file. You need to specify the ID number at the end of the URL, with a #. This is what mine looks like:

# List of Blogs
#
# Enter a blog name followed by the endpoint URL
#
# Blog Name    URL
eric's blog    http://eric@limulus.net/blog/xmlsrv/xmlrpc.php#5

They have an example like this in the documentation, but don’t actually say what the # does.

The next problem with 1.8.2 was a database error. I was able to fix that with help from this forum thread.

Finally, when requesting old posts, b2evolution was stripping out the newlines. Commenting out the few culprit str_replace() calls in xmlrpc.php fixes this problem (search for “kludge”).

So the navigation menu was pretty much a waste of space. Redundant on the homepage, useless on all the other pages of the site. In its place, are three links in the site banner. A link to the homepage, this blog, and my contact page. It’s obvious what these links go to and they make use of space that was previously being lost.

After looking into Virtual Private Server hosts for about a month, I finally settled on Xelhosting. They had some uptime issues at first, but they seem to be completely resolved (current uptime 20 days).

The switch in ISP has also brought about a switch in HTTP servers. Previously using Apache, limulus.net now uses lighttpd. I don’t have anything against Apache, however lighttpd is ideal when you only have 128MB of RAM to work with. I think I’ve managed to port everything over fine, but let me know if you see anything returning errors or displaying oddly.

I’ve also created a Google Homepage widget that displays a random image from the gallery. Just create a section with the following URL: https://limulus.net/igoogle/random-photo.xml

While I’m at it I ought to move limulus.net’s registration over to Go Daddy where the rest of my domains are (ericmccarthy.com, limul.us, and unallocated.com). Go Daddy’s admin interface is atrocious, but I suppose you get what you pay for. Hopefully some day I’ll log into it and find that it’s been redone as an AJAX application.

And if you are wondering about the horseshoe crab, Limulus polyphemus is its genus and species.

Be sure to let me know if something about the redesign does not work in your browser or if you think the design sucks.