I recently posted that I was going to begin redesigning my site. Beyond just a change of colors and images, I wanted to create a more powerful underlying system. Movable Type offers a lot of options and features that are built-in to the CMS, but I get a few too many 500 errors to stay happy. In that vein, I’m wanting to extend the functionality of my website using PHP, MySQL, XML, and other related technologies that I’m learning as we speak.

I’m sick of it. Some people really like the design of this site. I do too, really, but I want something more. I want to be a LION TAMER! I’ve been significantly inspired by a variety of designs lately, and I think I’m going to attempt to take my favorite elements of a few different designs, play with them, and make them my own. Maybe once I’m done this site will be Vault-worthy. Some of the designs I’ve been looking at are here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

After doing some thinking and such, I’ve made some decisions about my syndication feeds. From now on, RSS 0.91 and RSS 1.0 feeds will contain summary posts, and the RSS 2.0 feed will contain full posts. That way, people can pick and choose which they want. My Atom feed contains both. It’s pretty simple, I think. Those of you who subscribe to the Atom feed have the best of both worlds. I’m not sure if there is a news aggregator out there yet that can switch between summaries and full posts in Atom feeds, but I’ve filed a request with Nick Bradbury to add this functionality to Feed Demon.

I spent about five hours last night playing with my RSS Reader. I think I’m beginning to get the hang of some of this PHP stuff. Anyways, I’ve made some tweaks here and there to make it a bit more friendly. The first thing I did was make it more error-friendly. If someone mistypes a feed URL, instead of seeing nonsense errors that have no value to the user, you get a simple error page that suggests that there was a problem with the feed, and to try a new feed URL.

I’ve been using a PHP script called “Blocker” to block unwanted visitors to my website for several months now. It started out as a way to block refer spam from my refer list, and has grown to a full-fledged blocker of IP’s, Hostnames, Referrers, and User Agents. About once a month, I go through my raw access logs and check to see who’s been visiting me (and who I need to block from visiting me again). This morning, I’ve added several new spambots to the list of things to block.

Well, I know that I haven’t been talking much about web stuff lately, so I figured that I might as well make up for it with a doozie… Yesterday, the W3C released a shiny new recommendation called XML 1.1, and another called Namespaces in XML 1.1. The changes in XML 1.1 are seemingly minimal, and appear to primarily affect certain character entities defined in newer versions of Unicode. The W3C’s XML 1.0 Recommendation was first issued in 1998, and despite the issuance of many errata culminating in a Third Edition of 2004, has remained (by intention) unchanged with respect to what is well-formed XML and what is not.

I’ve just started using the brand-new Basecamp™ project management system (created by 37 Signals to begin handling a few web design projects that I have going right now. So far, I’m impressed. It really says a lot, actually. It takes a lot to impress me. Sure there are plenty of things out there that are cool, but they’re not necessarily impressive. Basecamp is impressive. One of the niftiest features, is that it generates both an RSS feed (which is great for an RSS-junkie like me), and an iCal file (compatible with Apple’s iCal as well as Mozilla Calendar).

I was discussing the history of the Browser Wars with a friend last night. Afterwords, I went home, and as I put my daughter to bed, I made up a “Once upon a time” story for her so that she would go to sleep. I know it must’ve been a strange comination of the two events, coupled with the sandwich I ate just before I went to bed. I had the strangest dream. It was kinda like when Cliff Huxtable had wierd dreams after eating sandwiches on the Cosby Show.

I’ve been using the Feed Demon RSS reader since 1.0 rc4, which was around November-ish. I liked it so much, that when 1.0 went final in January, I bought a license. This was the first time I’d ever actually bought shareware, and it kinda made me feel good. Wierd. Anyways, the only real problem I had with Feed Demon was that it didn’t properly parse the feed for Dunstan’s blog. I went back and looked at his XML, and he wasn’t using a <link> tag for his permalinks.

Joe Lieberman spammed me today! Well, kind of. He’s apparently using the very-evil “StarProse Referrer Advertising System 2004” to spam people’s Refer lists so that he can rank higher in search engines, or at least get people to click through to his site. Y’know all of that comment spam going around? Yeah, well this is the same thing, except for referrer lists. Lucky, I have “refer spam” countermeasures in place. I’ve got a series of IP’s, Referrers, Hostnames, and SpamBot User Agents that have been blocked for one reason or another.