Alan’s Blogometer

(Update)

Barren Vending, Powerfully Clean by Adam.

I’m familiar with two separate feed readers. You’ll have to adapt these instructions for your feed reader.

Permanent Reader Zero for NetNewsWire on OS X

To perminently achieve reader zero for NetNewsWire on OS X

• Open the applications folder.
• Drag NetNewsWire to the trash.
• Empty the trash.

That was an afterthought, though. My main feed reader was Google Reader. Getting Google Reade to perminant Reader Zero was a more complicated procedure.

Permanent Reader Zero for Google Reader

First, delete all your subscriptions.

• Go to Settings link in the top left corner.
• Click on the Subscriptions tab.
• Select All N Subscriptions where N is the depressing number messages devoid of context that are ready to either consume your precious time and attention or else suck away at your sense of accomplishment.
• Click the Unsubscribe button.

This is not enough. If you are like me you have been creating a mound of items that you swear you’ll read some day using tags and stars.

Burn it.

I Love Caddyshack by Ian.

There is a ruckus in the roof sometimes. I thought they were mice, gnawing away at the insulation or the timbers in the room.

One day I saw that they were squirrels. There was a heavy scurrying in the attic, and I traced the source of the sound with my eyes. They made circles overhead ran to a corner of my room and then appeared in a perfect transition on the branches of the live oak outside my window. Two squirrels in a mad dash to the trunk and out of view, as if they were tuner sports cars, squealing out of a parking structure and onto the freeways of California to settle some score with their scurrying.

Test Pattern by Jen.

About two months ago, my funding for a dedicated Think New Orleans server came to an end. Think New Orleans had been running well for a while, so I thought it wouldn’t matter much to consolidate it with the server that hosts this blog, ljubljana.blogometer.com.

Neither website gets large amounts of traffic. Think New Orleans receives 500 unique visitors a day on a good day. I can’t imagine that all the neighborhood blogs, the New Orleans Wiki, and my personal/professional blog together attract more than 2000 unique visitors a day. Even a modest dedicated server should be able to handle that much traffic, unless something is terribly wrong.

The server also runs postfix and dovecot (IMAP). It serves up the bloggers listserv using GNU Mailmain. It acts as a Subversion repository through Apache. None of these applications concern me. They are all very well written applications. The mail and Subversion services serve only a single user, me.

The Think New Orleans web menagerie includes WordPress, MediaWiki and Instiki. WordPress and Mediawiki are PHP applications running from Apache. Instiki is in a Ruby Webrick web server which is accessed via Apache mod_proxy.

Neighborhood blogs such as Northwest Carrollton and Think New Orleans itself are run in WordPress. There are two flavors of New Orleans Wiki. The Mediawiki version and the Instiki version. The latter is getting more use these days. It contains the definitive List of New Orleans Bloggers and the resources created by CHAT.

There is an instance of Jetty that is rarely visited that runs a few simple servlets that is also accessed via Apache mod_proxy. This is very low traffic and the Servlets are my own. The unconference signup servlet is an example. It writes a web form to file.

I run a script from cron that requests http://blogometer.com/. If it takes more than three seconds to serve, I kill all httpd processes and restart Apache.

Please have a look at the crash reports and tell me what you think.

Morphing Grid by Dan Allison.

Ever find yourself with a data collection, and you can see the steps in your head, create a form, create a table? It’s a dry task that gets dryer by the minute once you find yourself once again creating that paged results table for the contact us or event registration form you’ve created a thousand times before.

I can’t tell you how much slicker it is to send that data directly to an EditGrid workbook. It is a quick and easy database that is intuitive for your users. Instead of a paged html table, their information is available as rich full-featured spreadsheet.

My Tchotchke Boxes by 1213 1982.

I created a series of online spreadsheets of every building, construction and demolition permit issuesd in Orleans Parish since January 2005. These spreadsheets are available at Think New Orleans.

The EditGrid API can automate the creation of reports and act as an easy use and share database for light data collection applications. I’ll write about my experience with EditGrid and why you should consider EditGrid at the back end for your next data collection task.

This is my programmer notebook on my getting to know you time with EditGrid.

I wrote my program in Java. Here are the three gotchas that I encountered.

Every time I create a new listserv, I need to remember how to do it. I’m going to write about it in Blogometer so I don’t have to think so hard next time.

Adding a new GNU Mailman listserv.

[alan@~]$ cd /usr/lib/mailman
[alan@ljubljana mailman]$ sudo ./bin/newlist barcampnola@thinknola.com
Enter the email of the person running the list: alan@thinknola.com
Initial barcampnola password:
To finish creating your mailing list, you must edit your /etc/aliases (or
equivalent) file by adding the following lines, and possibly running the
`newaliases’ program:
## barcampnola mailing listbarcampnola:              “|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman post barcampnola”
barcampnola-admin:        “|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman admin barcampnola”
barcampnola-bounces:      “|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman bounces barcampnola”
barcampnola-confirm:      “|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman confirm barcampnola”
barcampnola-join:         “|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman join barcampnola”
barcampnola-leave:        “|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman leave barcampnola”
barcampnola-owner:        “|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman owner barcampnola”
barcampnola-request:      “|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman request barcampnola”
barcampnola-subscribe:    “|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman subscribe barcampnola”
barcampnola-unsubscribe:  “|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman unsubscribe barcampnola”

Hit enter to notify barcampnola owner…

[alan@ljubljana mailman]$

Then you cut and paste the aliases into /etc/mailman/aliases

[alan@ljubljana mailman]$ sudo /usr/bin/newaliases
[alan@ljubljana mailman]$ sudo ./bin/withlist -l -r fix_url barcampnola

My server, ljubljana.blogometer.com, will sometimes hang after receiving too many requests. I don’t want it to keep me from getting in via ssh, so I’ve written a rather drastic shell program to monitor the server. It fetches the blogometer.com home page using curl. If it takes longer than three seconds, it blocks port 80. This is run by cron every minute. The script will write out the output of the programs ps ax and free. I’ve not been able to figure out what’s really causing the server to choke with that output so I’ve added top -n 5 -b and tail -n 500 /var/log/httpd/access_log. I’m open to any suggestions of commands to add to this snapshot.

Looking at Ed Trelinski’s blog I see that FeedBurner is now offering email subscriptions. I’m going to stick with FeedBlitz for the email of my feeds for the time being.