PolarLava::Blog

Well, I've finally gotten back on my bike after nearly a three month layoff.  This year was an unmitigated disaster for me when it comes to cycling.  I took no long rides and had very little time on the weekends to ride.  Then in September I got sick.  Then I got busy.  Then I got sick again.  Then I was on vacation.  Then I got sick —again!  And all the while laziness settled in and the house started getting cold in the morning…a sure recipe for failure.   Now with less than two weeks left in the year, I've suddenly found some motivation.  This means very little for this year, but could be a good springboard into 2005.  I now just need to stay motivated and overcome the cold floors and general lethargy in the mornings to maintain it.  Must think strong.

PolarBlog V1.3.0 has been released.  This release contains…

Enhancements

• Internationalization (I18N) Support - PolarBlog should now be capable of displaying in languages other than U.S. English.  This release contains both English and German language files.  If you are fluent in another language and are interested in using PolarBlog in another language, please read this blog entry.

• Comment email notification not always being sent.
• Comment emails not being sent, but replies work.
• Displayed comments sometimes appear out of order.
• Search results are displayed oldest to newest instead of newest to oldest.
• "Next" navigation button is erroroneously displayed with search results.
• Double slashes in URL when PolarBlog is the servers root page.

• Added I18N_LANG
• Added I18N_CHARSET
• Added I18N_DATE_SEPARATOR_FORMAT
• Added I18N_DATE_FORMAT
• Added USE_GOOGLE_LINK
• Added USE_WORD_COUNT
• Deprecated DATE_SEPARATOR_FORMAT
• Deprecated DATE_FORMAT

After much contemplation, I've finally come up with something to put on my front page other than just the lava lamp.

I've been unhappy with the front page for quite some time, but wasn't really sure what to do with it.  I didn't want my blog as my front page so I needed to come up with some sort of introduction page.  After all, it is effectively the "welcome mat" at your front door and should make a visitor feel welcome and explain what they will find "inside".  Thus I've added such an introduction and a brief outline of my various projects.  Actually, I think most user of my site come through one of the "side doors"…most likely one of the projects, but then surf around from there.  I know this is often how I learn more about someone on the web…I find a deep link into their site and then start exploring the rest of their site.  Thus my new front page provides a quick rundown of who I am and what's going on here.  I hope you like it as most anything would be an improvement over the previous stark page that it was.

If you run/code a PHP based sites, you owe it to yourself to check out jpcache.  I've been using it here at PolarLava for at least the past year and a half.  This bad boy will GZip compress your pages before they are sent to the browser, which cuts down on your bandwidth as well as speeds up your page loads.  Additionally you can tell it to cache a page for a specified period of time.  This makes those DB generated "static" pages into true static pages, thus making them much faster.  And you have your choice of either storing your cached pages in flat files or a MySQL database, which is what I do.

Another alternative if you are distributing code but don't need caching, is my GZipContent class.  It provides the benefit from GZipping compressing the output, but doesn't do any caching.  If you are interested in this, just drop me a line.

Although it's not released as of this writing, GZContent will be part of PolarBlog beginning in V1.4.0.  Although this blog actually doesn't nor will it be using that, as my whole site runs under jpcache.  ;)

01/04/2005
A few weeks back I spent some time hacking on jpcache to implement a feature that I wanted, but it lacked.  That being the ability to flush individual pages.  I had added the ability to flush all pages, permanently cached pages or just expirable pages some time ago.  But you still couldn't flush individual pages.  Previously I had sent this basic flushing change to Jean-Pierre, the developer of this application for possible inclusion in a  future release.  Like all of us, he's busy and has not put out a new release in quite some time.  Anyhow, I've pushed this modification a bit further now and have the ability to flush individually cached pages.  Generally this is far more useful than flushing groups of pages, although sometimes that is useful too.  I forwarded this latest change to Jean-Pierre who wrote me back to let me know that some form of this will make it into the next release of jpcache which he hopes to start on soon.  Yeah!

Okay, I've been lurking around it for a while, but I finally signed up at del.icio.us have started my own bookmark collection.  I can see this becoming really addictive, but also very useful.

I used to collect lots of bookmarks, but they were always a hassle to manage.  Thus several years ago I basically stopped book marking things and would just search for whatever I needed.  Google obviously has made this easier, but often you can't find your way back to that exact link you found previously.  You know the one…the one you didn't bother to save or bookmark!  ;)

The biggest reason I like this is that it will allow me to easily "share" my bookmarks between work, home and wherever I may happen to be.  I can always access this list.  This is also the same reason that I switched to using a web mail interface exclusively a few years back.  Unless you are always in one place —very unlikely for most people these days, you need to be able to access your information globally.