scriptygoddess

As I learn more about web standards, I've been wanting to gain more info on XHTML. Here's a few good overview sites that I bookmarked lately:

WebMonkey's XHTML Overview
W3School's XHTML section
W3C Markup Validator

Found this cool site tracking software on sourceforge: awstats.

I'm hoping to play with it today, so hopefully I'll have an update to this post with my report.

This partially in response to some modification requests to the smilie launch… This script will launch a new window. If/when it looses it's focus (ie. it's in the background) if the person clicks the link again, rather than launching a *new* window, or appearing to do nothing at all, this will bring the (previously launched) window to the front – or launch a new one if it had been closed…
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I really liked Girlie's "comment leader board". My only problem was that, I've been blogging for nearly two years. People who commented a lot on my site a year ago, don't neccessarily come by anymore – and there's new people who come by, who comment a lot, and I feel they should be able to get some recognition too… SO, I evened out the score. I modified the code so it will only look at the last month for top commenters.

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Eric Meyer has a cool new tool/toy on his site — the Color Blender. Enter 2 hex codes and it will give you the colors between it. Very cool!

To move a browser window to a specific location on the users screen:

window.moveTo(x,y);

replacing "x,y" with pixel coordinates.

More info here, where they also have the below which will give you the users screen width, height:

screen.width
screen.height

Also, to resize the browser window:

window.resize(width,height)

Now, before you go all crazy on me – I'm not suggesting people do this for sport on their blogs. Messing around with people's browser's sizes, position, etc. will be annoying and NOT very usable. The reason why I needed the code above was to create a "minimize my browser" type effect with a bookmarklet for my mac (aka. "hide! the boss is coming"). The end result is this: mini-me

Thanks to a recent trackback ping from this post on electrosketch.org I found this site: onlinetools.org

Among many other cool things, they also have a php counter, and they posted a cool bookmarklet to put a bunch of image info into the "alt" tag, and (this link from electrosketch) a php newsletter manager…

I've had a few requests for a simple php counter that doesn't use mySQL. php-princess has one here.

(While you're there – poke around that site – lots of neat stuff there)

(non blog related post) Needed to use this php function: strchr (alias to strstr).

I had a field that had a person's full name (first and last). 99.999% of the time, the first name and last name were seperated by a space (no Mr. or Mrs. in there) and I needed a script that assumed as such and grabbed what was more than likely the person's first name. I found the script below on that strchr function page.

<?php
$fullname = $row['customername'];
$toFind = " ";
echo str_replace( strchr($fullname, $toFind), "", $fullname );
?>

so if $row['customername'] was "Jane Smith"… the script above would return just "Jane"

A few weeks ago, Kristine posted about Redirects in MT, and this got me thinking. I had already looked at an archive mapping solution which was recently updated, but it required that I have access to the server config files (not just a .htaccess file) because a RewriteMap can only be defined in the server config files.

So tonight when I decided, after a great deal of pondering (about 10 minutes), to change my archiving format to something that didn't produce 1000+ numerically named directories I needed a way to map the archive numbers to their new named location. Here is the solution I came up with, based on some modifications of the pre-existing code.

First download mt-archivefinder.cgi and rename it to mt-archivefinder.cgi (or any other name that suits your purposes). Put it in the MT directory.

You will need to change a couple of the lines at the top of the file to match your server's configuration. Make sure to chmod the file 755.

Next you will need to do some mod_rewrite mojo with a .htaccess file. Create a .htaccess file or edit the existing file in the root of your archives directory. To that file add:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/archive/[0-9]{6}.html
RewriteRule ^(.*).html$ /mt/mt-archivefinder.cgi?$1

You will need to change it to reflect your path structure. If all goes well, you will be automagically redirected from any numbered file like /archives/000001.html to whatever new archiving scheme you enter into the individual archive template in the Weblog Config panel in MT.

For example, I was using

<$MTEntryID pad="1">/index.php

and now I'm using

<$MTArchiveDate format="%Y"$>/<$MTArchiveDate format="%m"$>/<$MTEntryTitle dirify="1"$>/index.php

I used the following mod_rewrite rule to automatically forward all links to the old archive style to the new archive style.

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/history/[0-9]{6}/
RewriteRule ^(.*)/$ /mt/mt-archivefinder.cgi?$1

That's all it takes!

Many thanks to Alex for the inspiration and the code.