News items for tag virtualbookcase - Koos van den Hout

There is an interesting relation between 'website with technical subject' and 'visitors with IPv6'. I counted the number of unique addresses of visitors via IPv6 to several websites I run for the month of July 2010 and found the following percentages:

• http://weather.idefix.net/ weather maps : 5% (1%)
• http://pictures.idefix.net/ pictures : 4% (2%)
• http://idefix.net/ my homepage : 2% (1%)
• http://netwerk.pcgg.nl/ hcc!pcgg netwerkgroep : 2% (2%)
• http://bbs.idefix.net/ BBS files : 1%
• http://webcam.idefix.net/ the webcam : <1%
• http://www.virtualbookcase.com/ The Virtual Bookcase : < 1%
• http://www.camp-wireless.org/ Camp Wireless : < 1%

Comparing it to July 2009 (percentages between parentheses) does show growth.

Time for some website programming: Amazon was notifying me that Amazon 'Product Advertising API' requests (formerly known as Amazon Web Service) now need to be digitally signed. The 'why' of this is probably something with security. For the 'how' I had to revive those braincells which once programmed Amazon Web Service into The Virtual Bookcase. Those braincells took time as I was first browsing in the wrong sourcefiles. But, after having a peek at Jaap's free Amazon PHP Scripts and incorporating the change to sign requests into my sources, I found the right way again.

One of those times I am glad I have a development version of the site (smaller database, code in development), a qa version (production database, candidate code) and a running version (production database, production code) to test changes like this. The visitors of The Virtual Bookcase never saw all the tries in getting the code to work right.

It was a while since I did any serious work on that site. Otherwise it runs on autopilot and I only add new books and reviews from time to time. Ok, the income from the site has dropped in the same way.

Computers are better at... doing what you program to, not what you want. There is still an older computer running which once hosted my mailman mailinglists for several domains. I shut down mailman on that machine and migrated the lists. But mailman was never removed from the startup files and the machine rebooted today, resulting in three years of mailman monthly reminders mailed at once. So if you were looking why you got old mailman reminders from virtualbookcase, this is why.

The Virtual Bookcase is back online too, and mail is flowing again for all the domains. Lots of typing, checking and everything to move the stuff to the home server. But, finished (I think).
Update: and all the web statistics are working again and updated. Finished?

And it is back! Idefix 4 broke in a major way: the power supply let out the magic smoke in a big way: the hosting company called me to let me know the server was smelling funny and did not want to start up at all. Since the end of idefix 4 in a rack was near anyway the decision was made to move the server home. There I used another power supply to get access to my data again. The old powersupply was a 300 Watt powersupply which seems to be way underrated for a dual Xeon system. My best guess is that the instability the system had came from the powersupply anyway. So, time to move more domains home. Content from idefix.net is now here at home and virtualbookcase will be next when I find time. I had started migrating Camp Wireless so I finished that migration fast. Mail is diverted to a different place so I have a bit of time to configure all the mailing lists and other things.

Did some work on The Virtual Bookcase. First of all Amazon notified me that amazon web services was going to disable version 3 of the API which I was still using (yes, a year after the first notification that it was going to be ended .. not that much time for virtualbookcase at the moment). So time to do some PHP programming and redo the stuff for version 4. I also noticed that the bot for the russian search site Yandex was causing high amounts of hits but would not even return a direct link to www.virtualbookcase.com when searching on virtual bookcase at yandex. So I wanted to disable Yandex in robots.txt but I could not easily find the right name to put in robots.txt because all the help at Yandex is also in Russian. Finally I found some hints at this page describing robots.txt in russian that the right User-Agent probably is Yandex. And the robots.txt for cisco.com agrees.

While checking the logs of The Virtual Bookcase to see if I made any errors in the pages, I noticed another webbot requesting loads of pages, the bot related to Webclipping.com. I looked at their site and noticed that they are no search engine, they just scour the web looking for people having opinions about their paying customers. Which means: those requests by their spider will never result in visitors to The Virtual Bookcase. I only want to allow webbots that result in visitors to the site. So, I wanted to know what to put in robots.txt to stop them.. couldn't find that on their website so I asked via e-mail. The answer is (paraphrased): "We decide on our own which sites to visit.". My answer is to block them.

I finally redid a lot of the page design on The Virtual Bookcase. All is done with stylesheets now (no more crummy html 3.2 with tables in tables for making borders) and I created a bunch of new graphics for the site. I learned new stuff about graphic design, photographing and working with The Gimp in the process. For example, the bookcase-image in the background of the header took me about an hour to set up, photograph and adjust to get the result I wanted. I do like the current result although I am pondering some more changes. Time also goes into testing whether a neat stylesheet or image trick also works in other popular browsers (not everybody uses Firefox).

I picked up working on The Virtual Bookcase again (after letting it run for a while with just reviewing new books that came in). Page by page gets converted to html4 (I even try to pass the w3 validator) and I'm also looking at a restyle of the pages (html4 with css makes this a lot easier). The changes to html4 get incorporated in the site right away, the big changes will happen in one cutover. It is nice to note how html4+css makes the html source that much cleaner.

Doing lots of little stuff at The Virtual Bookcase. Updating pages to be a little more google-friendly, debugging some code to make stuff work again (seems php isn't too stable as a language, which made stuff fail in interesting ways). And keeping up with the book news. And finding out the stylesheet wasn't giving the wanted overviews in MSIE. Oops there.

idefix.net now lives on a new server, somewhat faster and more reliable. Time to update the picture on that page! I also moved stuff like The Virtual Bookcase and Camp Wireless. Only thing that gave me troubles right before moving was GNU mailman.

I guess it's the time for international book fairs.. after adding news about the International Book Fair of Havana to The Virtual Bookcase last week, this week the news is about the 17th World Book Fair in New Delhi.

I am reading Using Open Source Web Software with Windows. Yes, I am looking at it from a unix/linux perspective. It focuses mainly on setting up your own 'wamp' server (windows, apache, mysql, php). Having your own testing server that acts like your live webhost is a good idea.

More updates to The Virtual Bookcase, separating the amazon.com reviews from The Virtual Bookcase reviews, and adding a lot of amazon.com info in the process. Example: Reviews and details of 'Adventures of Riley: Mission to Madagascar' and Amazon.com info for 'Adventures of Riley: Mission to Madagascar'.

Just after my rant about parcel delivery I got a surprise as the first delivery of my amazon package (with tax to be payed) happened in the evening when I was at home. Now to find time to watch the BBS documentary.

Worked a bit on The Virtual Bookcase and added scripts to show items of book news such as the news on the latest Harry Potter book and site news. New stuff is done in html4 (you will see some artefacts of mixed html4 and html3.2 use because some building blocks are imported from other scripts) but slowly I am converting to html4 and thinking about improving the general design.

Updated an xml-rpc interface. This may sound completely buzzwordian to you, but it's just that amazon offers amazon webservices where xml-rpc calls are one possible way to query their database. The Virtual Bookcase uses this interface for detail information about books and searches.

Round of Apache web server upgrades, with included PHP upgrade. Somehow Apache on FreeBSD still doesn't like to build shared objects, so the Apache on idefix.net is statically linked again. Affected sites: The Virtual Bookcase, Camp Wireless, webcam.idefix.net, Fight Spam on the Internet!.

Integrated amazon book reviews into The Virtual Bookcase. Some work parsing xml from Amazon Webservices, but a nice result.

After about 4 months of using mod_gzip on The Virtual Bookcase, the results are less then expected since a lot of requests aren't compressable. In total, mod_gzip saved 15.86% bytes, on compressable requests mod_gzip saved 71.85% bytes.