Gerd Riesselmann: Notes From the Bog

I started re-reading the stories of H. P. Lovecraft. And like the first time, I'm impressed by the cosmos he created. Lovecraft's fiction sometimes is so concise, it's no wonder, people started thinking that part of it was real. Take for example the fictional Necronomicon. If you are into fantasy and horror fiction, you will most likely have read about it, since numerous writers mentioned it.

Writing about the base tag and stupid search engines I completly forgot that RSS doesn't accept relative links - for a good reason of course. This caused at least Bloglines to get a little bit wild about my feed and I'm sorry for the inconveniences this may have caused.

Anyhow, I decided to get rid of the problem once and for all by turning relative links into absolute when writing the feed. This is how I did it:

Within the last days I checked my log files more frequently then I did before to see if any files got lost when switching to drupal. And I recently got quite a lot of 404's, mostly caused by spam bots trying to pingback, trackback or post a comment. But some looked serious, until I figured out they where caused by a search spider unable to cope with the HTML base-tag.

If you read this, most presumable through a RSS feed, this page has successfully moved from WordPress 1.2 to Drupal 4.6.3. Regard this as beeing a simple test. I'll cover the why's and how's later on.

Autumn definitly has arrived and it’s getting dark quite early now. Especially it’s getting to dark to ride my bicycle in the evening. Wishing I had a fireplace, but since I don’t, there’s rarely anything to do but spend my time in front of the computer screen ;-).

However, I redesigned my page, so it looks a bit friendlier now (I hope). Hope you like it.

.. and I mean really slow, so slow

• it does nothing for about a minute each time you insert a new line in on of your code files
• each time you open a code file it's time for a coffee break
• setting a break point leaves you enough time to roll a cigarette

Then it's time to shut down, delete all the *.opt and *.ncb files from all your project directories and bring Visual Studio up again.

But beware: Deleting the *.opt files means loss of all information regarding your options! This is:

• The active configuration
• Working directory and programm arguments you entered in the project settings "debug" tab.

As mentioned earlier I was looking for a CMS to publish a newspaper. This is: Make the printed content available online and allow additional online publishing. Since I couldn’t find an appropriate system to do this out of the box, I finally decided to take Drupal and customize it to fit my needs. Here's why and how.

Is it only me or does anyone else thinks that using abbrevations like i18n for "internationalization" or l10n for "localisation" is b6t ("bullshit")? Heck, they cannot even be pronounced!

A while ago I hacked my WordPress installation to ask the user a stupid question before committing a comment. However, there's already a plugin, that does exactly this.

I validated my feed today and got a strange error: "Relative paths not allowed in <content:encoded>". I checked the according entry over and over but all links were correctly set absolute with "http://".

Were they? No! Finally I figured out that one link was written as <a href=" http://...">. Notice the little blank before "http://"? That caused the error.