A lot of the mail I used to get back in the USS Clueless days used to set my teeth on edge. But it wasn't the hate mail that bothered me the most. I didn't actually get all that much.

What I really hated was people who could only see details and were obsessed with them. I could predict what kinds of things would cause them to respond.

Any time I wrote a categorical statement without including a disclaimer to the effect that exceptions existed, I'd get email telling me about the exceptions even if those exceptions were rare, unimportant, and completely irrelevant to the point I was trying to make. It caused me, eventually, to create this graphic:

For instance: "If you fall a long distance and land in a tree, you're going to die." Response, "Well, yeah, nearly always but sometimes you can live. Here's a web site with a list of people who have fallen long distances and survived." Why are you wasting my time with this? This is a blog about anime, not a scientific treatise. Let's not be like that, OK?

All categorical statements are subject to exceptions. But anything which is written to include all such exceptions is about as much fun to read as contract boilerplate. The goal here is to have fun, not to achieve absolute precision and accuracy. And there's no better way to ruin the fun for me than that kind of comment.

I'd put that graphic just above the "add comment" entry box, but I can't figure out which template to modify.

[The comment in question has been deleted. Please don't post anything like it again, OK?]

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 05:15 PM | Comments (18) | Add Comment
Post contains 264 words, total size 2 kb.

1 Well, you know, not ALL categorical statements are subject to exceptions; let's see if I can find that website that lists all of the categorically categorical statements... *gets flattened by the "No Pedantic Nitpicking" anvil*

Posted by: Just John at June 06, 2007 05:42 PM (LtbY1)

2 All categorical statements are subject to exceptions.

Only the Sith speak in absolutes.

*WHANG!*

Ow!  That anvil's working overtime....

Posted by: ubu roi at June 06, 2007 05:57 PM (nLobQ)

3 I need to find which episode of Animaniacs includes "The Please, Please, Please Get A Life Foundation"...

Posted by: GreyDuck at June 06, 2007 09:24 PM (2Yvi7)

4

Actually, I think  I figured out just what you need to do.

Go into your templates, look for the one called "Entry" of the "Page" type.

Between where it says [include item.post] and [include form.template], you put the image html. If you're looking at the main page and expand the comments, it won't show up. But as soon as you click to add a comment, it takes you to the page unique to that post and the image will show up just above the comment entry box. You can see where I did that right here.

Posted by: Will at June 06, 2007 10:06 PM (olS40)

5 If you're wondering how he eats and breathes
and other science facts
just repeat to yourself it's just a show
I should really just relax!

Posted by: Phil Fraering at June 06, 2007 10:11 PM (B3Uki)

6 Will, thankyou; that's good to know. I think I'm going to hold off for a while yet, though.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at June 06, 2007 11:08 PM (+rSRq)

7 Its really stupid anyway, given that the real reason anime characters survive falls into trees ( or anything else ) is because generally speaking, they are more durable than real humans.  I just assume that in an anime setting, nobody asks questions if you demonstrate minor ( or sometimes major! ) superhuman powers without apparent cause.

( I mean, look at Ranma 1/2.  Apparently practicing *any skill at all* leads to developing superhuman martial arts prowess. . . )

Posted by: metaphysician at June 07, 2007 03:17 AM (Od3fy)

8

"Mea maxima culpa", Steven - and *Thank you* for a remarkable site!

Posted by: Jim Horn at June 07, 2007 07:55 AM (iXyVV)

9

Posted by: Tatterdemalian at June 07, 2007 08:38 AM (e3zEj)

10 Damn, Meta got both "zxyxx" and "odefy" as hashes. Mine only spells "Easy J," which makes me sound even more like the world's lamest rap wannabe than "Tatter D."

Posted by: Tatterdemalian at June 07, 2007 08:42 AM (e3zEj)

11 "All categorical statements are subject to exceptions"

Except for tautological categorical statements.  Those don't have exceptions.  :-D

*turned to stone by SdB's glare*

Posted by: Ach at June 07, 2007 10:10 AM (qKCV0)

12 Tatter--move, or use a proxy server. 

The one I've been getting is not too bad.

Posted by: Rick C at June 07, 2007 10:33 AM (deCbf)

13 Whoops--never mind, it changed.  Waah.

Posted by: Rick C at June 07, 2007 10:42 AM (deCbf)

14 Sorry, you're not allowed to have a better hash than the site owner. No no-bot for you!

Posted by: Tatterdemalian at June 07, 2007 02:09 PM (e3zEj)

15 Everybody's got a better hash than mine. Mine sucks.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at June 07, 2007 02:19 PM (+rSRq)

16 Well, I always read yours as "TSRq", which sounds like a network format for RPGing or something.  Thats something, right?

( Even if D&D is roughly at the bottom of the role playing barrel, if somewhat above the real sludge. . . )

Posted by: metaphysician at June 07, 2007 04:07 PM (Od3fy)

17 D&D is like the Microsoft of role playing games. It's the one system every geek has used and abused. Fellow RPGers might not have the damndest idea what you're talking about when you mention Dunkelzahn, or Nyarlathotep, or the Brujah, or the Inner Sphere, or Skaven, but everyone has heard of Bigby of Greyhawk and his infamous line of hand-y spells.

Posted by: Tatterdemalian at June 07, 2007 05:41 PM (e3zEj)

18 Thread closed due to rampant topic drift.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at June 07, 2007 06:14 PM (+rSRq)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

Using Minx for blog posting really is different. In a lot of ways it's better, but in some ways it's worse.

Transferring images up to this server is somewhat less convenient since I have to send them one-at-a-time. When I wanted to add a lot of images all at once (e.g. for a review, or when I changed the top rotation, or occasionally for the blog itself) that was a lot easier before. I am connected to my own server with a 100-base-T ethernet and can use FTP, so even transferring over 700 images for the top rotation is easy and rapid.

On the other hand, I'm finding that making blog posts is much more convenient overall with Minx.

Formatting is different. Some things are easier and some are harder, but overall Pixy has included so many nice formatting features that this is a big win for Minx. For instance, his "spoiler" tag is extremely easy to use, but if I had wanted to have vanishing segments on my own blog I would have had to hack Javascript and include unique labels.

One of the biggest wins for Minx is individual linkability for posts. I've been nagged and hassled about that ever since I started Chizumatic.

On the other hand, when my blog was on my own server, I had full access to Apache's logs to find out what was going on. With the blog on Pixy's server, currently I have almost no ability to monitor traffic and usage. Between that and the comments (about which the jury is still out) it means I myself end up visiting this site anything from 10 to 20 times a day.

Before I found cases where someone wrote responses to my posts by seeing their refers in the Apache logs. Now I can't do that, and since trackbacks suck (and are disabled) it means that the only way for me to tell that someone has linked to me is if it turns out to be someone whose blog I visit anyway. (Which is why you haven't seen very many "XXX comments" links here; I have no way of knowing.)

Including a link to the top rotation picture on my server has at least given me some information, though I'm not entirely certain what it means. It made quite clear one time when Shamus linked to one of my posts, since suddenly there were dozens of requests for the top rotation picture from that one post. But the only way I found out that it was Shamus who had done it was when I read his blog. If that happens again, but from someone whose blog I don't visit, I won't have any idea. (And I'll probably be very frustrated.)

My server has a traffic analysis package installed. I have never really trusted that it was giving me accurate information. One of the things it told me was the most popular 200 retrievals were (HTML files only) and how many times each had been accessed since the last time I reset statistic gathering. For quite a long time now it's been telling me that the Chizumatic main page was being loaded between 1200 and 1400 times per day.

Without going into too many details I put together a script that tells me how many times the top rotation picture has been loaded with a refer from this site. It's been running 600-800 per day. (Yesterday was 755. Today so far is 372 as I write this.)

That includes top loads from specific posts as well as from the main page. It also includes every load. So someone who visits the main page and then visits an individual post shows up twice.

Call it an exercise in humility: I fear I was a bit smug before about my 1200-per-day main page traffic level, and now I'm finding out that it wasn't anything like that high -- though I'm not really sure what was really going on.

It's almost enough to make me put in some sort of site monitoring bug -- except that I hate those when others use them and I personally have all the big ones blocked in Proxomitron. Pixy is promising us native mechanisms for monitoring traffic and usage; I guess I'll have to wait for that.

Besides which, getting obsessed about traffic is one of the pathological failure modes for a blogger. If you're not doing this because you love it, you shouldn't be doing it at all. If you judge your worth by traffic levels, you're sure to be depressed all the time. (I have enough problem with that as it is.)

And in any case my readers have been proving their love for me by leaving comments here. Or something along those lines. A few of those have been like having a neighborhood cat demonstrate its love by leaving dead birds on my porch, but most of them have been better than that.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 03:45 PM | Comments (27) | Add Comment
Post contains 825 words, total size 5 kb.

1 There's quite a bit of statistics collection going on behind the scenes right now; you can see some of it in your Statistics page (under Tools).  I'll post some examples and documentation for accessing the data; it's just more template tags.

I'm not tracking referrers yet, though I'm planning to add that.

The image load stats would under-report page views, I think, because it would be cached by the browser.  So what you're seeing now is probably equivalent to "visits", and page views would typically be at least 1.5x that.

I could even check...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at June 01, 2007 05:21 PM (PiXy!)

2 I can't speak for anyone else, but I load the page a little less often becaues you've now got an RSS feed, so I don't have to check to see if you updated. I doubt that accounts for getting half the visitors you thought you were getting, but I'm sure it accounts for something...

Posted by: Mark at June 01, 2007 05:22 PM (2cMUJ)

3

When I click my "statistics" link in the control page all it does is return to the control page. (Even though the URL says "stats".) Pixy, I don't think you've enabled access to that information for us yet.

Anyway, it really isn't very important. It was just something that seemed worth mentioning in this post since it was unexpected.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at June 01, 2007 05:28 PM (+rSRq)

4

When I click my "statistics" link in the control page all it does is return to the control page.

Oopsy.  I'm doing an update today, so I'll fix that.  I probably didn't create the stats folders for existing blogs when I set that up.  (Stats are still recorded; the folder just controls the display function.)

Anyway, you're doing 2000+ pageviews a day overall.  There's no easy way for me to work out how much of that is the front page, though; the stats don't really work that way.  I'd have to take the total and then subtract all the hits to individual "threads"; the main page doesn't have a thread number, so the remainder would 

Scratch that, I can do it, it's just in another table.  Except that table only keeps monthly stats, so...  Looks like about 900 a day since you went active in May.  So far for June (and it's using GMT, so that's less than 26 hours), it's 1121 hits to the front page and 337 to the RSS and Atom feeds.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at June 01, 2007 05:50 PM (PiXy!)

5 Mark, what is the URL of my RSS feed? If it shows comments, I think I should start using it instead of visiting the site myself 30 times a day.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at June 01, 2007 09:03 PM (+rSRq)

6 I'll drop a dead bird on your porch anytime, Steve.  That's what we do for the cool kids.

Posted by: astro at June 01, 2007 09:46 PM (q4NkN)

7

Sorry about the dead birds, I wasn't sure what gifts to bring so I just brought the standard ones.  I'll try to do better.

Dead mice, how about them?  Dead rabbits are trendy but a bit out of my reach...

Apologies all around....

Posted by: BeckoningChasm at June 01, 2007 10:08 PM (pGYvN)

8 The standard feeds don't have comments in them, though that can be added.

RSS and Atom.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at June 01, 2007 10:48 PM (PiXy!)

9

I'm always skeptical of the various statistics programs myself.  I serve the DMotR images from shamusyoung.mu.nu, and the rest of the site from shamusyoung.com. This is sort of the opposite of the setup you are using with your top rotation image. 

You'd think the traffic of the two sites would look somewhat similar, but they don't.  Visitors fluctuate on both sites, but the fluctuations seem more or less independant of one another.  I've always been a little vague on what qualifies as an "impression"  vs. a "visitor".  If someone pounds away at the refresh button every 30 seconds, does that qualify as a new "visitor"?  What if they navigate to another page and come back 30 seconds later?  What if they return to the front page but their browser only grabs the timestamp, determines the page is up-to-date, and so shows the user the cached version?  What about people reading the site through an RSS aggregator like bloglines - do those people even show up at all?

When my visits at sy.com go down and my impressions at me.nu go UP, it makes me conclude that the whole thing is a total crapshoot and the numbers are, at best, a vague guide.  The stats program I use (on both servers) is AwStats, which I think probably ought to be renamed to TeaLeaves.

Posted by: Shamus at June 01, 2007 10:54 PM (GDT1x)

10 Use Google blog search if you're interested in the linkage

http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&q=chizumatic.mee.nu&btnG=Search+Blogs

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at June 01, 2007 11:07 PM (9imyF)

11

Pixy, when you say that comments "can be added" to the RSS feed, do you mean by me or by you?

It would be handy for me if it included comments so that I knew when that changed. (What I don't want is to receive them by email, on the other hand.) I don't need to see the comments; just knowing when the most recent one was posted would be enough.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at June 01, 2007 11:23 PM (+rSRq)

12

Pixy, when you say that comments "can be added" to the RSS feed, do you mean by me or by you?

Well, in theory you could do it, since it's just a question of modifying the templates.  In practice, I'd need to start with posting some more examples.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at June 02, 2007 12:24 AM (PiXy!)

13

Dead critters aren't an expression of love per se; they're an expression of concern:  "This nebbish can't even catch his own prey, so I guess I'd better show him how.  OK, this is a mouse; this how you catch a mouse; this is how you kill a mouse..."

One of my cats regularly brought me live and dead animals on that theory.  Another was itself so inept that I should have shared my catches with her, except that she wasn't interested in beer and cigars...

Posted by: Akatsukami at June 02, 2007 04:41 AM (tJV0g)

14 Pixy posted the URLs... the only other thing I'd suggest is making the RSS have the full text of each entry, rather than just an exerpt. Can you create separate feeds from the two you already have? As for comments, I'm not sure how best to handle that. Wordpress blogs have a dynamic RSS feed for each entry, but that's really only useful if you've got huge comment threads (like Shamus) A lot of blogs have a recent comments feed (sort of like the section in your sidenav), which might work best. The only annoying thing about RSS for comments would be spam...

Posted by: Mark at June 02, 2007 07:20 AM (2cMUJ)

15

I wouldn't put the full text of the post in the RSS file even if I know how. Not only do I tend to go on at ridiculous length, but if you could read my entire blog from the RSS file, then no one would have any incentive to actually visit the blog itself.

An RSS feed is supposed to be a summary, a short file you can retrieve often to find out if anything has changed without putting unreasonable load on the server.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at June 02, 2007 07:35 AM (+rSRq)

16 Akatsukami, that's not always true.  I had a cat in college when I was sharing a house with some other people.  One of them got mad at her and threw her out of the house for tripping him up while he was cooking.  Several hours later, we left the house...and found an average of 3 freshly killed mice at every door.  We always figured it was an apology.

Posted by: Rick C at June 02, 2007 08:16 AM (nObOt)

17 nObOt??

Posted by: Rick C at June 02, 2007 08:18 AM (nObOt)

18

That's a hash of your IP. Without revealing your IP to everyone, it permits us to verify that you're the same person who posted using that name yesterday, and last week, and so on.

To put it differently, if someone else decided to make a post using the name "Rick C", we'd at least know they were doing it from a different IP, in case it was scandalous or out of character.

The guy I'm jealous of is "metaphysician", because his IP hash is "ZXyXx".

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at June 02, 2007 09:10 AM (+rSRq)

19 Hah, nice.  Won't always be ZXyXx, though.  I visit here from three different computers in three different locations.  Like, I'd bet the hash for my IP circa this post is different than normal.

Oddly enough though, I have run across the occasional other 'metaphysician' in my time online, either directly, or via trying to create a user login and finding it refuses the name as 'already in use.'

Posted by: metaphysician at June 02, 2007 10:11 AM (v9yTv)

20

Cl3var trick, that.  I actually kinda like it.  I notice Pixy's isn't a hash per se, but them's the perks of owning the site, I guess.

Pixy, is mee.nu or mu.nu going pay at some point?  I've been kicking around the idea of starting my own blog for a while now--I have one on MSN Spaces, but it's next to defunct, people have to get a passport to comment, etc.

 

Posted by: Rick C at June 02, 2007 08:35 PM (nObOt)

21 mee.nu will be pay / ad-supported.  (The existing beta-testers get free accounts, but the beta is now closed.)  Ad-supported accounts go live this week, and paid accounts later this month.

mu.nu is my hobby, so it will always be free, but it will always be small for the same reason.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at June 02, 2007 09:54 PM (PiXy!)

22 Oookay. . . whats up with the random letter entry?

Posted by: metaphysician at June 13, 2007 09:36 AM (euFqi)

23 We're getting a wave of these right now.  They're coming from a botnet that's managed to get past the honeypot, and being nonsense they're not getting caught by any of the filter rules.

There is a pattern to them, though, so I should be able to create a custom rule to catch them.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at June 13, 2007 10:11 AM (PiXy!)

24 Now, as to why... I have no idea.  There's no URL attached, and there's nothing distinctive to act as a marker.  Either it's a test of the botnet itself or someone is just being a dick.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at June 13, 2007 10:13 AM (PiXy!)

25 Is your honeypot trick something commonly used?  If so, I'd bet 'penetration test' or something similar.

Posted by: metaphysician at June 13, 2007 10:35 AM (lXszF)

26 The gobbledegook spammer has been a long term presence on Pixy's systems for at least a year. This isn't anything new.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at June 13, 2007 10:55 AM (+rSRq)

27 I've uploaded a babblebot filter.  It's statistical, but in such a way that it's very unlikely a real comment will get flagged.  I hope...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at June 13, 2007 06:38 PM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

Ignore this, too. I'm trying to find out what Minx does to the URL when two posts have exactly the same title.

UPDATE: As I feared. Pixy, you have a problem. The "timestamp" link and the "Add Comment" link on the first of the two posts now go to this one instead. It looks as if the first one is in the database (because it's still displaying on the front page), but if anyone directly links to the first one they will get the second one.

If the blogger ever creates a post with a duplicate title, even months later, all links from outside to the older post will be broken and will reroute to the newer post.

If there's already a post with a given title, the URL for the new one should get an alteration, like a number added after it. In other words, this one should have the URL "http://chizumatic.mee.nu/a_duplicate_title002" or something like that.

That means the posting process will need to do a database search to see if there is a duplicate.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 10:36 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment
Post contains 179 words, total size 1 kb.

1 Not exactly a bug, rather "broken as designed".  It's supposed to do that... but you're supposed to have the ability to tell it to form the URLs to your requirements.  Only that's not in place yet.

I'll get it fixed.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at May 29, 2007 11:54 PM (PiXy!)

2 Oh, and you can change the path for a post.  On the post edit screen, click on Options, which opens up a section for additional options, including the path.

(I still intend to provide options to control this behaviour, but that's how you can fix it right now.)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at May 30, 2007 11:52 AM (PiXy!)

3 Hi there,

totally unrelated to your blog, but I read a discussion on metafilter (I was wondering why I had 1000 more hits than normal ) and I read your post you made about the recording of the First Moog Quartet with the Boston Pops. I am VERY interested in it. Could you contact me at my e-mail adres I provided in my post?

kind regards,
Coen

Posted by: Coen at May 30, 2007 02:43 PM (wQYRu)

4

No, I can't, because you also included a URL and that takes precedence. (Try mousing over your name above.)

There's not a lot I can do for you, because I don't have that tape anymore.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at May 30, 2007 04:50 PM (+rSRq)

5

As I haven't looked at it yet, I'm not sure about this, but does not MeeNu blogs allow you to examine the e-mail addresses of commentors, Steven, in the editing screens (for example, where you'd go if you wanted to delete a comment)?

I know MuNu (where The Pond is located) does...

Posted by: Wonderduck at May 30, 2007 06:55 PM (6YRS5)

6 Answer: no. The only info I get is the same info seen above: the URL of his web site.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at May 30, 2007 07:26 PM (+rSRq)

7 The information is there - in the [comment.mail] field - but it's not presented in the current version of the comment management screen due to lack of space.  Another thing I need to attend to...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at May 30, 2007 07:59 PM (PiXy!)

8 There's a lot of that, by the way - what I'm working on right now is mostly exposing existing features by coding the appropriate templates.  That inevitably leads to debugging, tweaking, and additional features, so it's taking rather longer than I'd anticipated.

It's the old 80/20 rule: The first 80% of the project takes 80% of the time, and the last 20% takes the other 80% of the time...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at May 30, 2007 08:02 PM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

Ignore this. I'm testing something.

UPDATE: It is impossible to add a comment to this thread. The "Add Comment" link goes to the later thread that has the same title.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 10:35 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 33 words, total size 1 kb.

I just had someone report a PIBKAC, and it occurred to me that it might happen to others and they might get equally confused.

In order to prevent people from directly linking to the images on my server, I have set up access filtration based on referer URL. There is a specific whitelist of permitted referers, and if any other appears then my server sends a special graphics file that indicates that something is wrong. Here is the whitelist:

www.denbeste.nu
denbeste.nu
regulus.denbeste.nu
70.90.130.45
192.168.1.1
chizumatic.mee.nu

Other URLs will correctly access my sites, but will run afoul of this filtration and won't permit you to see image files.

The particular person who complained about this turned out to be using "www.chizumatic.mee.nu" and that's not on the list. So he didn't see the top rotation picture. Instead he saw my "bandwidth theft" PNG file

That is not a bug. That is how it is supposed to work. The instigation for doing this was one time when someone linked to one of my images from Fark and brought my server to its knees. But since then I've had an ongoing problem with the denizens of MySpace linking to my images. I eventually got fed up and created a very obnoxious 1024*2048 blinking GIF file, and started sending that instead. The goal was to cause the friends/readers of the MySpace denizen to complain so that the denizen would remove the link to me -- and it's worked. I get hardly any hits from there anymore. (Also, getting my image files removed from Google helped a lot.)

Anyway, if you see an ugly "bandwidth theft" image where the top rotation image should appear, the solution is for you to correct your bookmark.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 11:58 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
Post contains 289 words, total size 2 kb.

When I close comments on a particular thread, it means "Don't make comments about this subject." It doesn't mean "Put comments about this subject on a different thread."

When I delete your off-topic derail comment on the other thread, it means "Yes, I really didn't want comments on this topic." It doesn't mean "Please post your comment a second time so I can delete it a second time."

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 09:25 AM | Comments (12) | Add Comment
Post contains 69 words, total size 1 kb.