Showing posts with label Blog. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Blog. Show all posts

Thursday, November 14, 2013

Roger, G3XBM - get well soon

I was enormously pleased to see a new post from my fellow blogger Roger, G3XBM Roger is recovering from a severe stroke and  facing difficulties I can only imagine. I'm sure I'm not the only one missing his posts about QRP projects nd accounts of his low power activities. Get well soon, Roger.

Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Operation successful.

My operation to remove my gall bladder was successful. Now I'm supposed to take it easy and avoid strenuous activity for a few months. No more five mile walks for a bit. It looks as if I will be logging more time in front of the computer and radio for a while.

The operation to migrate this blog to a new generation Blogger template has also been completed. Comments are now working again, but I'm not happy with the header graphic. I had to go with what I could make given my absence of artistic skills, rather than what I would like to have done. So there may well be some more changes in that area to come.

I had hoped to use a smart looking template from a free templates site. But at first I couldn't find how to load it into Blogger. So I started off with one of the standard Blogger templates. As I was customising that I accidentally stumbled across the option to load a template from an XML file. Working in Blogger is like being in a maze, remembering seeing the tool I wanted but going round in circles until I located it again.

The problem with the custom template was that I found it contained some things I didn't want, and the Blogger visual design tools didn't allow me to remove them. It would probably have been necessary to edit the XML, but that is a step beyond my expertise. So in the end I went back to the modified Blogger template. I'm happy with the layout now, and commenting works again which was the reason I was forced to change. In fact I now have Google+ commenting which if you haven't tried it is much better. But I'd still like to find something more radio-themed for the header graphic.

Sunday, June 16, 2013

Under construction

Due to the problem with commenting I am reluctantly moving this blog to a new template. This will probably take a few days - especially as I will be going to hospital on Tuesday - because a lot of trial and error will be involved (more error than trial I dare say.)

Please bear with me while I make changes, try different graphics and so on. Normal service will be restored as soon as possible!

Saturday, June 15, 2013

No comment

It appears that commenting is broken for this blog. If you try to comment then the comment box pops up but if you click in the box to type your comment it just displays "Opening..."

I have mentioned the problem in the Blogger support forum but I haven't received any answers as yet. I'm hoping they will realize there is a problem and do something about it.

I am wondering if this problem has occurred since I Google+ - enabled my blog. I mean, I know it has, but I'm not sure if commenting broke after I enabled it. And I don't know how to un-enable it.

The only thing I can think of trying is to go to one of Blogger's standard boring templates. Because commenting still works on One Foot in the Grave, which uses one.

Saturday, May 11, 2013

Not much happening

Nothing blogworthy has happened at G4ILO in the last few days. My mind has been preoccupied with two other things: frustration at still being without a driving license and anxiety about my forthcoming gall bladder operation. As a nurse said yesterday during my pre-operation assessment, a gall bladder op is nothing compared to the surgery I have had for my brain tumour. The difference is with the brain tumour everything happened very quickly so I didn't have time to do much thinking about it.

I haven't been completely inactive on the radio in the time since my last post. Most days when I haven't been going to a medical appointment I have turned on my 2 metre and 30 metre APRS gateways. Most days I have also set my K3 to monitor the WSPR frequencies on 10 metres. There have been some signs of Sporadic-E activity, such as the presence of Russian taxi operators on the 10m WSPR frequency. A few days ago DXmaps showed a small but intense Sporadic-E opening on 6 metres. My 10m signals have frequently been spotted by 4X1RF and have also reached Argentina and the Philippines. I hope that things will soon perk up and motivate me to do something worth writing about again.

Friday, December 14, 2012

The 1,000th post

Blogger tells me that this blog contains 999 posts, which must make this one the one-thousandth. When I started blogging almost four years ago back in February 2009 I had no idea that it would go on for so long.

Of course, the events of 18 months ago gave me every reason to believe I would never achieve such a total. Fortunately fate, having given me a metaphorical kick in the crotch, decided to smile on me after all and so I have defied the doctors' predictions. Slowly but surely I have been going from strength to strength, so that I think I have a fighting chance of going on for at least another 1,000.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of my readers, especially those who comment or email, without whom the whole business of blogging would be a waste of time. I am particularly grateful to the many who sent messages of encouragement which were a great morale booster to both Olga and myself during a difficult time.

I hope you will all keep reading this as well as my "brain tumour blog" One Foot in the Grave, which is rapidly approaching a milestone of its own. I hope I will keep on "beating the bastard" and carry on blogging (and hamming) for years to come.

Tuesday, June 05, 2012

I am not a robot

For the last few months I have been getting more and more irritated by the captcha word verification required to comment on certain blogs. The captchas Blogger used to use were perfectly adequate, in my opinion. But Blogger insists on "improving" its user interface. If it ain't broke, don't fix it I say.

The latest two-part captchas Blogger uses seem designed to keep out the good guys and allow in the bad. The statement "Please prove you're not a robot" seems ironic, as only a robot could decipher the letters. This morning, on a blog I won't mention, I had to refresh the captcha three times before getting one that contained only recognizable letters.

Of course if Blogger's captchas were annoying me they were also annoying you, my readers. So I decided to disable word verification on both G4ILO's Blog and One Foot in the Grave. At the same time, I have enabled moderation for comments to posts more than 2 days old. Most of the valid comments are made within that time period anyway. If a comment is made later than that then a further small delay until I approve it will hardly be noticed. Hopefully this will result in an increase in valid comments and fewer spammy ones. But if I find too many spammers are taking advantage of the two day window of opportunity I'll turn moderation on for all comments. If any internet lowlifes are reading this, don't even think about it.

For the benefit of anyone who arrives here looking for a way to turn off word verification, here's how. First, make sure you are using the old Blogger interface (I'd switched back to it already as I could never find anything in the new one.) Then, under Manage Blogs, click on Settings for your blog. Then click on Comments in the row of tabs along the top. The settings you need are on that page.

Tuesday, July 06, 2010

No comment

I think something must be broken in Blogger. Two people posted comments today, one each to the two postings I made. I know this because I received an emailed copy of the comments. Neither of the comments are showing up in the blog. In the Blogger dashboard, one of the posts shows "1 comment" but when I click on that link I can't see it.

So, Paul and S.o.a.l., don't be offended. I didn't delete your comments.

Thursday, February 11, 2010

Follow me, follow you

A casualty of my blog's forced migration from my web hosting to Blogger's that almost went unnoticed is that I have lost my list of followers. This isn't something you can see, because the blogger gadget to display a blog's followers wasn't available to those who used their own hosting, and I can't use it without changing the template, and I'd rather have root canal than mess around with templates and style sheets.

Although you can still find my blog if you go to the old web addresses, it would appear that Blogger doesn't know you're following it. I don't know whether updates will still appear in your Blogger dashboard if you are subscribed using the old address.

So if you can, I would suggest that you update your subscription so that you are using the address http://blog.g4ilo.com/ or http://blog.g4ilo.com/rss.xml if you are using a feed reader. I'd hate to lose any of my followers!

Friday, February 05, 2010

Relocation accomplished

G4ILO's Blog is now at its new home http://blog.g4ilo.com and I'm hoping that nothing got left behind in the move!

The actual change from FTP hosting to Blogger hosting was fairly easy. It was just a matter of selecting the "custom domain" option from the publishing options, then clicking the Advanced button and putting in the name I wanted: blog.g4ilo.com.

I also had to specify something called a "Missing Files Redirect" which tells the Blogger server where to look for any files used in the blog that it doesn't have. This is important because although the text content is now served up by Blogger (and presumably any images included in new postings will be hosted there) all the images in my existing postings remain where I uploaded them, on the old server. And I certainly did not want to go through over 300 postings editing all the image locations to provide their full path!

Next I had to go to my web host and create a CNAME record for the new domain blog.g4ilo.com which pointed to ghs.google.com. This basically tells the world via the Domain Name Service (DNS) that blog.g4ilo.com is hosted on Google's server. I then had to wait while this information propagated around the Internet, so I went and helped Olga get the shopping.

That was the easy part. The difficult bit - the part I was concerned about - was ensuring that all references to my blog at its old location would automatically redirect to the new one. Google was promising to build a migration tool that would take care of all this, but I was afraid that it would only take care of the situation where people only had a blog on their server. My blog was cohabiting with my G4ILO's Shack website so I wanted only links to the blog pages to be redirected.

Blogger techs told me "you can write an .htaccess file that can do this" but they seemed to have rather more faith in my ability to do this than I had. The .htaccess file is a configuration file used by Apache web servers that allow them to do more than simply serve the page "blah.html" when someone's browser requests that exact page. None of the .html pages at G4ILO's Shack exist as real files at all. They are all generated on the fly from a MySQL database by a content management system which knows what text is required thanks to an .htaccess file that the CMS authors thankfully provided. And I didn't want to break that.

The .htaccess file uses something called "regular expressions" to match against the filenames that are requested. They caused a perplexed expression to appear on my face because I don't have the kind of mind that is good at puzzles and I just couldn't figure out how to use them. So I did what I normally do when I hit a technical problem: Google to see if someone cleverer than me had had the same problem and managed to solve it.

I found several examples where people had transferred their blog from domain.com/blog, or even from just domain.com where the blog was the only thing on the server. But eventually I managed to find some examples which, with a bit of trial and error testing, seems to do the job of redirecting all requests for blog files to the new server. For the benefit of those following in my footsteps, the lines I had to insert in my .htaccess file are:

RedirectMatch permanent ^/blog.html$ http://blog.g4ilo.com/
RedirectMatch permanent ^/rss.xml$ http://blog.g4ilo.com/rss.xml
RedirectMatch permanent ^/atom.xml$ http://blog.g4ilo.com/atom.xml
RedirectMatch permanent ^/20([0-9][0-9])_([0-9][0-9])_([0-9][0-9])_archive.html$ http://blog.g4ilo.com/20$1_$2_$3_archive.html
RedirectMatch permanent ^/20([0-9][0-9])/(.*)$ http://blog.g4ilo.com/20$1/$2
RedirectMatch permanent ^/labels/(.*).html$ http://blog.g4ilo.com/search/label/$1


These take care of, respectively, my old blog main page (blog.html), the RSS and Atom feeds, the archives, the individual posts, and the labels.

The thing that caused the most head scratching in the end was the bit of code that displays the last ten blog topics on the front page of G4ILO's Shack. This is generated from the RSS XML file produced by Blogger but for some reason it worked with the copy that was stored on my server but not with the one obtained direct from Blogger even though they looked practically identical. But after more trial and error that issue was also resolved at around midnight last night.

I'm crossing my fingers, but I think it all works. I have deleted all the blog files off the old server now, apart from the uploaded images of course and a few other files used by the template. Please let me know if you notice anything that seems wrong.

My blog address is now blog.g4ilo.com and you should update it if you are not receiving updates. But because of the redirection, hopefully you won't need to. Now I'm going for a lie down. Somebody please pass me an ice pack!

Thursday, February 04, 2010

G4ILO's Blog is moving

As I wrote in my last post a couple of days ago, Blogger is terminating its FTP service that allowed me to publish my blog on my g4ilo.com server. This will therefore be the last post to this server.

I am hoping to be able to migrate the blog to a new location which will be blog.g4ilo.com. It is frustrating to sit and wait for Blogger to come up with a migration tool that may or may not work, because I have several interesting things that I want to write about that I don't wish to be prematurely consigned to the bit bucket. So I am going to attempt to move the blog myself. Don't be surprised if things go a bit haywire in the process.

If the address you see in your browser address bar is blog.g4ilo.com (instead of www.g4ilo.com) you will know that the move has at least partially worked. The hard part is going to be ensuring that links to pages using the old address are redirected seamlessly to the new one. This is supposed to be achievable using something called .htaccess, but it is rocket science and I will probably need help with it from Blogger techs or other clever people.

So fingers crossed, here we go.

Tuesday, February 02, 2010

Blogger FTP service - end of

Like many ham radio blogs, this one uses Google's Blogger. Unlike most ham radio blogs, this one is hosted on my own web server (well, not really my own web server, just some cheap shared web hosting that I already had for my G4ILO's Shack website.) I use Blogger's FTP option to upload my blog pages to my server. I made that decision when I started this blog simply because I already had a website and server and I thought it would help improve my site's popularity to have the blog pages under my g4ilo.com domain instead of Blogger's. Plus any add-in service that works on a per domain basis such as the ClustrMaps visitor tracker or Ham Banner Exchange works for the whole site, including the blog.

There have been times when I cursed this decision, notably during the occasions when Blogger's FTP uploading didn't work. Also, this is becoming a pretty big blog and any update that affects all the pages means the entire blog has to be re-uploaded, which can take a long time. But I really felt that I had passed the point of no return for changing this decision as my blog now consisted of too many pages and I couldn't see how to switch without losing all my existing content, or at least breaking all the links.

Blogger has now given me notice that they are going to shut down their FTP service on March 26, so I now have no choice. I will not for much longer be able to continue publishing my blog on this site. The email claims that Blogger is developing a tool that will handle redirecting traffic from the old URL to the new URL which will handle "the vast majority of situations." But it would not surprise me at all to discover that one of the situations it will not handle is that where a blog shares a domain with a website running under a content management system that already uses a complicated .htaccess script to create virtual web pages from a CMS database.

This looks like one of those situations where if that's where I have to get to, it would be better not to start from here. I don't like messy solutions, so leaving the existing blog pages as a kind of historical archive and starting afresh isn't an option. There are a couple of ham bloggers (you know who you are) who still have pages from earlier attempts online (and even one or two who appear to have two different blogs containing many of the same posts) and it's confusing when you fetch up at some of those pages and find they don't link to any recent content. So if I have to start over, it really will be a clean, fresh start. Though at the moment the thought of junking over 300 pages makes me wonder why I bother at all.

Until I know where I am going with this, there seems little point in adding more content to the existing blog. If anyone reading this has already done what Google is forcing me to do and could help me do it without waiting to see what tools they can come up with and whether they will work then I would welcome your assistance or advice.

Monday, September 21, 2009

Blogrolling

Prompted by Jason, NT7S's latest post in his thoughtful blog "Ripples in the Ether", I have finally got round to adding a blogroll to this blog. In case you don't know, a blogroll is just a jargon word for a list of links to other blogs that a blogger thinks are worth reading. As Jason points out, networking ham radio blogs together in this way brings in more visitors and increases the readership, because if people like your blog they think that they will probably like other blogs you like too. Most of the blogs I now read regularly I first found using the blogrolls on other sites.

Adding a blogroll should be easy, and probably is if you host your blog on Blogger's site. But I'm obstinately still having Blogger create and upload static HTML pages to my g4ilo.com web server, in the belief that this will improve the SEO (search engine optimization) of my entire site.

Whether it really does or not is anyone's guess. Search engine optimization is supposedly a science - though actually a black art - that is intended to get your site listed nearer the top of the first search engine results page so you get more visitors.

There are loads of "experts" who will give you all sorts of advice as to how to improve a website's SEO. However, in my opinion there are three things that a website must have to have to get lots of visitors:
  • It has to have been in existence for a while - the longer the better.
  • It needs to have lots of good content containing the phrases that the people you want to come visit will be searching for (like "QRP" or "stealth radio".)
  • It needs to have lots of incoming links from other good, related sites.
There isn't a lot you can do about the first one if you're just starting your site. But since a blog contains a lot of content it's obviously a good thing to have, and since blogrolls are links to sites they are a good thing too, because if you link to other people's blogs they'll probably link back to you.

Monday, July 13, 2009

Commenting fixed

Thanks to a helpful reply from someone in the Blogger help forum, it should now be possible to post comments to the blog again. I have changed the comments settings so that comments are now posted in a pop-up window. The problem occurred because I had chosen the option for comments to be embedded in the blog page. The height of the embedded comment window was restricted and preventing some users from seeing all of the comment form. This problem has only recently started occurring, so it's presumably a bug in Blogger, but the workaround is better than waiting for them to fix it.

Sunday, July 12, 2009

No comment

A few people in the last couple of days have emailed me with comments that they tried to post to the blog, particularly to the QRT item. André, M0JEK explained the problem as: "The window keeps getting chopped so I can't enter the code."

I have just tried to post comments using both Firefox 3.5 and Internet Explorer 6 (since I don't use Internet Explorer, I've never bothered installing a later version) and can't see a problem. So if you do experience the problem and are clever enough to know what the reason is, I'd appreciate it if you would let me know.

[Wild guess.] Perhaps it has something to do with how you are receiving the blog, such as through a feed aggregator?

Friday, April 17, 2009

Blogger b*ggered

I'm experiencing major problems publishing to my blog at the moment. Since yesterday, attempts to publish new posts using FTP are failing with the message that "it is taking longer than expected." In fact, it is not working at all, although I did manage to get my post about the Fldigi update uploaded yesterday evening after a brief change of error message.

It's very frustrating. I'm not the only one suffering from this, judging from the number of complaints in the Blogger Help Group, so it's unlikely to be a problem with my server. It's almost enough to make me switch to having Blogger host the blog, but then all the links to it would be broken.