A random search for ‘vodex’ has uncovered that I’ve suffered a similar fate to Chris Heilmann’s blog! (I read him after meeting at the Yahoo Conference in 2009, but that’s another story).

In my case, I was running a script I wrote several years back, “Thumbmaker”, and at some point had left some folders world-writable, which were abused by spambots (see his post for details).

Unlike him, I’d inadvertently cleaned the whole lot out when I upgraded my site recently.

They’re lurking in Google’s index for the foreseeable future; an example is http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=site%3Avodex.net+avi.

As an aside, like Chris, I also have a Google Alert for ‘vodex’ but they’ve never shown up in there… implying that this is old spam, & this happened some time ago…

In a previous post, I talked about migrating http://vodex.net from the hand-rolled custom scripts to Wordpress. Well, it’s taken a while longer than expected due to other priorities, but it’s done!

Current strategy is to use the site as a set of static pages rather than an actual blog as described here. Then used various plugins like PHP-exec, along with some refactoring, to get the applications, such as MailMaker, over to Wordpress-usable format. The front page is a lifestream of my various web activity, including public Facebook content when they next sort out their APIs.

Observations:

1) There’s a lot of old, old content on that site, that wasn’t so obvious/exposed, and that was largely ignored in favour of Facebook/Google Reader, etc. Now it’s in Wordpress & generally more discoverable, it’s slightly embarrassing, like the RecordHash Data Object, or frankly bizarre, like Waxy Dogheads. I may well end up hiding a lot of these pages.

2) Wordpress is a great platform, it’s really matured. After the content tweaks, it’s much more suitable than the custom CMS I’d writtenmyself.

3) Ruby on Rails applications aren’t ported over, but they don’t work right now, possibly because…

4) The main driver for this was my host breaking PHP, email, and the Rails apps during some sort of systems upgrade I wasn’t notified about. I’m on a ‘development sandbox’ for just $25 a year. Time to change that I think.

5) Now that I’ve started this post, I have the urge to start recapping other areas of my life, such as the use of Kanban, going on a badly-marketed diet again, and other stuff. But Livejournal is on the slide more than ever. Shall I start blogging proper again, or am I joining in the trend of blogging dying off & using increasingly mature social media instead? Could this become my last ever LJ post? Time will tell..

Recently, Wordpress 2.8 was released. This, & other events, prompted me to take a loot at vodex.net, as it’s been largely abandoned for some time… imagine my delight to discover the Wordpress install wasn’t even working anymore for some reason; the Livejournal post import was broken, I couldn’t log in.. it was a mess. The old version, kept behind to enable custom modifications to integrate with Livejournal / the main site / various PHP applications, didn’t help. (Security hole? I’d had the forethought to use a hidden path for Wordpress itself)

I use a lot more social media now, & have largely abandoned Livejournal, along with a lot of other people. (They could have been facebook, you know; shame they don’t expose enough data to Google to let me find that very LJ post by someone on that topic). Anyway, I’m working on converting the entire site to Wordpress’s considerably improved feature set, including various plugins for FriendFeed, Google Reader, etc. (I especially like the All-New Livejournal Importer for Wordpress, which is a much better job than WP’s original LJ import script, or my own LJ import script … except I don’t want to duplicate posts on the site, I want to link to them. Might use it for a private LJ backup tool, though).

So, watch this space. Or rather, that space…

I’ve added a few things in MailMaker, the spoof Daily Mail generator:

• option to create a Daily Express. It’s not a perfect match; when I have some more time, I’ll refactor so you can use the Express font/layout. And do The Sun as well.
• made meaningful ‘alt text’ to the images
• created an RSS feed of latest covers
• and – bit warily – added some extra images, including, of course, Madeleine McCann. Not sure it might turn out a good idea (for hopefully obvious reasons of taste, hence the delay), but like Diana, what Mail/Express cover is complete without some?

Yes, I seem to have fully caught the twitter bug.

I’ve made use of Paul Stamatiou’s RSS to Twitter script to automatically pimp for technology’s sake announce new Livejournal posts on twitter. It’ll have to run as a cron job for now, unless I can find a way for Livejournal to ping whenever a post is made.

Woohoo! I’ve just gone to Technorati, found out that old addresses for blogs and stuff were out of date, and claimed my canonical LJ address – using OpenID! It took longer to type this than to do it. And first real use of OpenID, too.

heh, it said it’d been last updated 573 days ago. That’s very not right.

Sorry, spod post.

One of my favourite cartoons is Ruben Bolling’s Tom the Dancing Bug.
Now and then, he runs a ‘Super-Fun-Pak Comix‘,
an entire page of parodies of cartoon strips (and a masterclass in succint humour).

I’ve made a page on vodex.net that shows individual Fun-Pak-Comix at random, as well as including a title banner.

It’s at
http://vodex.net/superfunpakcomix.

I’ve written a script to remove duplicate iCal events after my Google Calendar got messed up – http://vodex.net/ical_prune/ .

I’m migrating my website from PHP to Ruby on Rails. Last night, moved the PHP source code form my old hosts to RailsPlayground. Whilst good value (they do Rails, and have about 10 times the bandwidth/storage/features as my old host for less money) their site/support forum seems to have very dodgy availability. So was largely on my own for figuring out how to host PHP as I’m not that experienced in remote barebones hosting.

Turns out Rails routing applies across the whole site, not just in the railsapp directory, so PHP has to end in .php, and it has to go into the public folder, which in hindsight makes sense (most PHP apps live in the public area of a site).

Here’s the roadmap:

• I have until the nameservers update to arrange for pretty URLs like vodex.net/goalpost to point to dirty ones like vodex.net/goalpost/index.php – don’t want to mess with visitors/search engines. This is a temporary kludge, so I’ll probably just alter Apache conf. a bit. I only have one Rails app live at present (Universe on Rails) and it’s low profile so it’s not important as I’ll…
• Install a Ruby CMS/blog like Typo, and use it instead of the custom PHP setup I used to have.
• Develop something like my current Wordpress Livejournal importer for Typo, using the LiveJournal Ruby module, thus standing on shoulders of giants (LJ’s XML-RPC API seems a little counter-intuitive).
• Move on from there.

In related news, work upon a mockup document management system at the University proceeds apace, partially due to productivity gains from said Ruby on Rails. It’s true – Rails encapsulates best practice out of the box, leading to much better overall progress despite the learning curve. It’s all about the framework – Stuff that would have taken me months in PHP (even with PEAR) has taken just days in Rails. It’s also giving me experience in tools I didn’t make use of when developing GoalPost – Subversion version control, test-driven development, and similar agile methodologies.

At present I’m changing the view from an initial makeshift scaffold layout involving fieldsets to a much solider layout. Changing layout in rails is a snap, much easier than, say, in PHP, where you ended up with HTML-producing code inside logic classes *cough*.  Good workflow here – determine a view/layout (separate from the concerns of the logic creating it), then produce the current design in Dreamweaver or Nvu, say, and then componentize it into layouts. Much cleaner.

The Daily Mail Maker got a traffic spike of 180 visits/700 pageviews on Thursday 16th March, getting on for five times my usual site traffic. All from a single unreplied-to link from b3ta.com (here), it seems. I guess they have a lot of office worker traffic

For future reference to self, to find individual referrers in Google Analytics, find Referring Source under Marketing Optimization, and then, (to get individual referrers, which up to now I couldn’t find) Cross-Segment Performance with Content. A little annoying I couldn’t find that, as I knew it must capture the data…