Category Archives: Server-Side

Server-side scripting and configuration.

New Hosting

Server-Side

I have finally decided that I’d better move to a new web host fairly quickly. I’m rapidly using up my disk quota, having used 29.88MB of my 30MB quota (99.60% full). Additionally Blogger is just driving me insane with its total lack of useful features, and inability to delete comment spam without including a delete icon on the pages, which I don’t like to have. Also, in an attempt to simulate the delete icon by just generating the link manually, somehow I ended up totally deleting an entire post from August last year, instead of just the comment spam (I have no idea how or why). Luckily, I have a copy of it available and it will be returning.

So, back to the web hosting… I have decided to go with A Small Orange, which was suggested to me by Tim White. I’ve just gone with the tiny plan (75MB/$30 per year), which is less than half that I’m paying now and more than twice the disk quota. I expect the change over to be some time during the next two weeks, if not sooner. During that time, some resources on this site may be temporarily unavailable, but rest assured that I will do my best to have everything back to normal as soon as possible.

World’s Greatest CMS

Projects, Server-Side

Work is beginning on the world’s best ever, open-source CMS! Charl van Niekerk has had the idea for a while to write an open source, general purpose CMS that not only produces valid content by default, but ensures that all content written is valid. Some of the basic validation requirements for the system should include:

  • Well formed, including properly encoded entities and proper nesting and closing of elements.
  • Valid according to DOCTYPE.
  • Valid character encodings. No windows-1252 characters in the range 0×80 to 0×9F for documents declared as ISO-8859-1, UTF-8 or any other character encoding – they are control characters. The default, and highly recommended character encoding should be UTF-8.

Basically, the system should not allow invalid content under any circumstances, including from reader comments. It should use a real validator, not a linter which are quite often misleading or totally incorrect.

These are just a few of the basic requirements that I would like to see. Anne van Kesteren has written a much more complete list of requirements for the perfect weblog system which we will be referencing a lot, but some of it may be overkill.

So, this project is just getting started and, AFAIK, will be run through Source Forge. If you have any questions, ideas about system requirements or want to get involved, you can contact either myself or Charl van Niekerk. It’s his project, I’m just helping out, but we want as many people who are willing and able to get involved. So let’s make this happen, and let’s build the best CMS ever!

DNS Issues

Server-Side

Over the past 14 hours, since about 2004-10-29T00:00+10:00, this site was experiencing severe technical difficulties. Some of you may have noticed that the Atom feeds were reported as invalid by your feed reader, or received a 307 Temporary Redirect to a page explaining some technical difficulties; or, depending on when you visited, noticed that none of the pages were styled and contained errors about include directives. If any of you that took a look at the source, you would have noticed a disastrous frameset document I discussed earlier, that is used forward requests. However, all it does is use a single frame to mask the real URI from the location bar.

The problem was in fact that the domain name servers had been reset to those of my previous domain registrar, and hence was reaching the wrong web host A WHOIS indicated that the name servers were set to:

Name Server: ns3.bottledomains.net.au 
Name Server IP: 209.126.193.12 
Name Server: ns4.bottledomains.net.au 
Name Server IP: 69.10.134.206

After I contacted my current host, iiNet, this morning, within a few hours they promptly re-delegated the name servers to the correct ones, and restored my site for full working order. However, it’s an issue that should never have occurred. I was asked by iiNet to contact Bottle Domains to ensure this doesn’t happen again, as they believed it must have been them that reclaimed the servers. However the response from Bottle Domains indicated that it would not have been them as they do not control the domain. So, basically, I don’t have a clue what caused it, nor any guarantee that it won’t happen again. I just hope it doesn’t.