Category: site

Thu 03 Nov 2005

Gregarius is way too cool

In an effort to stay current with the world I adopted the practice of news feed aggregation. Before I upgraded to Ubuntu, I was using Liferea a gnome based GUI. It met my needs at the time and had a lot of great features. For example you could create virtual feed based a search filter. I used this to search Tech Bargains' feed for deals from Dell. (I was in the market for a Laptop.) That allowed me to filter out all the other noise generated by discount coupons provided by other vendors. About the only thing I didn't like was the fact it was a fat client.

When I switched to Ubuntu packages for Liferea didn't exists. Sure I could compile it on my own, but who has time for that? Certainly not me. So my ability to stay in touch with the world would have to rely on my own efforts to manually go to news sites and listen to the radio. I pretty much ignore the television when it comes to news. All the news channels are pretty much garbage.

This leads me to the next attempt. A friend of my turned my on to the idea of generating a news feed in HTML so I could view it on the web. He offered up, rawdog which is rather plain. But as stated on the web site, "rawdog is a RSS Aggregator Without Delusions Of Grandeur". So don't expect much. I wanted something that had folders, which is something I had setup with Liferea. I also wanted to be able to mark ideas as read. I typically just read what I want them mark everything read.

Unsatisfied with rawdog, I figured there had to be other OSS available. Using a patented technique by searching Freshmeat logged in sorting based on popularity, I found Gregarius listed right below rawdog. This package has everything I need. Essentially you are the admin of your feeds. If you are not logged in people can view your feeds. It also lets you have private feeds. Which is nice for a couple of sites I want to keep to myself. Plus you can mark feeds read. This too is a feature reserved for the admin. The feeds are pulled automatically when a new one is added. After that hit the refresh button to update the site. You can add a cron job but why bother.

Setup is virtually a snap. All I did was untar the package into the root of my website. It packaged plainly with the directory rss. It uses a database either MySQL and SQLite if you install the development version. I found this out on the wiki after I made several attempts to get SQLite to work. Realizing it wouldn't, I defaulted to MySQL.

I spent a few minutes moving my feed list over from rawdog and added a great looking theme. There are a few things I have not explored. One is tagging and the other is categories. Looks like you can hold a feed forever and use either a tag or category to try and locate it later. But there is also searching for this. I am assuming once you tag or categorize it then it will remain permanently. Otherwise you can delete feeds in the admin screen.

Here is a link to my feeds enjoy. I also gave it a permanent link on the left called RSS.

Posted by Christian Pearce at 2:11PM EST [ /site | # ]

Tue 14 Jun 2005

Camiraminute

Come here a minute.

Posted by Christian Pearce at 12:14PM EDT [ /site | # ]

Wed 16 Feb 2005

Removed Awstats and Webalizer link

People were using my site as a method for getting hits directed to there. The would set the referrer to their site in a request to mine. They did this over and over again. They also did this with the search strings. Google would then index this stuff. I don't know why you call this I am sure it is a documented technique. Needless to say I am getting way to much traffic to my site. Maybe I will open it up in the future if I can figure out how to stop it.

Posted by Christian Pearce at 11:21AM EST [ /site | # ]

Thu 23 Sep 2004

Guide XML

I have been experimenting with something called Guide XML. I first read about it a couple years ago when I found myself interested in gentoo linux. I don't fully understand how it works but I have been using it to start a series of articles on Cfengine.

It is basically XML that uses XSLT. The XSLT transforms XML into HTML based on a XSL stylesheet. This stylesheet defines the final form of the HTML document. From what I can gather gentoo.org uses it for their entire site. Because the documents end it XML I am going to assume they have an XSLT processor running inside apache. The founder of gentoo linux wrote a couple of articles about it.

My plan is to learn more about this and adapt the rest of my site to use this methodology. Since my site focuses on blogs, articles, and pictures I can focus on writing a XSLT website system that allows me to create XML pages for the content. Having this I don't have to focus on form. The form is wrapped up in the XSL stylesheet. I hope to find other to collaborate on the project. Maybe we can call it Website XML.

Posted by Christian Pearce at 6:02PM EDT [ /site | # ]

Sun 12 Sep 2004

Partially Restored

I was able to recover the last time articles from google's cache. I found a more recent page on www.archive.org by using pearcec.com and not www.pearcec.com. But was no where near current. I might have a backup on my laptop at work with more current stuff. For now I lost everyhing between June and August. *sigh*

Posted by Christian Pearce at 9:43AM EDT [ /site | # ]

I whacked my website directory

I am currently working on rebuilding it. This is quite annoying. I had a tarbal from about June, but I lost everything in between. I was working with rsync and I apparently had --delete in the wrong place. I should have backed it up to begin with. This really stinks. I had made a lot of changes between then and now. Not to mention posts. I think I can reconstruct most of it from google's cache. Thank god for google. I checked archive.org, but they had a really old copy.

Posted by Christian Pearce at 9:06AM EDT [ /site | # ]

Fri 10 Sep 2004

AWStats Online

You will notice I added an Awstats link to my site. I configured Awstats. It is a great piece of software. Webalizer just wasn't doing it anymore. Not to mention Awstats is actively being developed. I don't think Webalizer has been touched in over a year. The problem I was having that prompted the update (besides the fact I like it better), is I couldn't get it to ignore the webmail traffic I produce to the site. I configured it to "IgnoreURL /webmail*", but nothing would happen. I suspect it is broken. It worked like a champ in Awstats with the following configuration: SkipFiles="REGEX[^/webmail] REGEX[^/tasks] REGEX[^/calendar] REGEX[^/awstats]". We use Awstats at Perfect Order. Plus it ships as a component with SysNav. I will leave Webalizer running for awhile. I also changed the log files in Apache from common to combined. This gives us Referrer and UserAgent stats.

Posted by Christian Pearce at 12:08PM EDT [ /site | # ]

Thu 06 May 2004

Added a links section

I added a new links section to the site. This gives me a chance to keep track of sites I want to read and review on a regular basis. I found the CFACT organization interesting. A fresh approach to consumers and the environmental issues we face.

Posted by Christian Pearce at 4:17PM EDT [ /site | # ]

Fri 16 Apr 2004

Google Adsense

I am experimenting with Google Adsense. The idea is Google will match ads with the content of my site. Reading who find my content interesting will also find the ads useful. I expect to get adds dealing with consulting, computers, linux, and motorcycles. Please click on links you might find of interest.

Posted by Christian Pearce at 9:49AM EDT [ /site | # ]