Jfoucher.com - A la voile sur la toile

I finally updated my other site, salamba.info to Wordpress 1.5 and there's no doubt about it, it's good, very good. The feature I really like is the ability for the plugins to have a configuration page. That was really missing from the previous verions.

Another thing is of course the ability to create "static" pages, for fixed content, although you need a separate template for them. This actually is the minus side for me, the complexification (is that even a word?) of the template system: much more flexible but much more work... " />

In case you're using a syndication software that can read RSS2.0 feeds, and if you don't like the layout of this blog I offer syndication feeds for its content as well as the comments posted on the posts. You can get feeds for the comments on individual posts from the link at the top of the comments section:

The main feeds are:

The entries rss feed

and the comments feed.

Ok, I finally got the captcha working. Wasn't that hard, but it was more the concept that was kind of eluding me... Where to send the data from the image and from the text box, how to compare them and so on.

I like the way my little script works, because if for whatever reason the commenter didn't fil the captcha field properly, they wil be sent an email containing a link allowing them to publish their own comment. I'm wondering if spammers would learn how to make their robots do that... Anyway, doesn't matter because I haven't had a *single* comment spam since I changed over from wordpress yesterday. Wait and see, I guess.

So this is it. I've been working on it for the past few days, and I'm quite happy with what I've got now. Of course, I'm sure many of you will not feel that way. I myself feel somewhat like having betrayed Wordpress...

Anyway, the move is made now and I don't think there's any going back. I feel such a freedom from being able to hack the code in any (bad) way I want, it was like a breath of fresh air for me.

There are still a lot of features left to implement, like pingback (that one is a toughie!), a proper calendar, ideally using XMLHttpRequests, comments feeds, Atom feeds and a few more things. I would like some suggestions from readers as well, to see what can be done.

For now though, trackbacks should be functionnal (feel free to test it) and the RSS feed for articles is available. I reused some code from a few wordpress plugins, and I would like to give credit to Michel Fortin for Markdown, to Phu Ly & Dunstan Orchard & Michael Heilemann for Dunstan's Time of day and Time Since, to Daryl for his Amazon wishlist plugin, although I don't know if that will stay there for long, and to Bitflux for the LiveSearch functions. Thanks go out to all of them.

The Wordpress plugins are of course still available at the old URLs, although a few of them (especially the style_chooser, since the advent of themes) are now obsolete.

Anyway, hope you like the new design and all... I am waiting for your suggestions, bug reports, rants, and so on.

Since the release of Wordpress 1.5, I've been wondering what to do with this blog.

I looked at upgrading, but that would mean a few days of work to have the blog the way I like it again. I hacked WP 1.2 so much that it would be very difficult to just upgrade and expect everything to go smoothly. Also I asked to myself: do I really need a blogging tool to do coffee as well as allow me to publish stuff easily. I guess I mean that Wordpress now has many more features than I have use for, and I don't really see the point of it.

So there you have it, I decided to design a blogging software from scratch. Yes, it takes some work, but maybe not much more as what I put in to hack wordpress. It's a great learning exercise anyway...

I just got myself one of the longest email addresses of the world, over at ABC... Whatever(via)!

I just couldn't stop laughing when I saw their 'sales pitch' on the home page, so I just had to open an account with them.

So, feel free to write me at jfoucher@abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijk.com

Ooops, looks like that address is too big for my layout! ;)

As you've probably seen on this blog if you've been here in the last few days, I have been subject to a case of referrer spam, made very useful by my use of the Referrer plugin.

I managed to delete most of these references to web sites of dubious content by going through the StatTraq table and eliminating all references to the particular IP address using these methods. That solved the immediate problem, but it could come back tomorrow and do the same thing. So I banned that IP address from submitting it's referrers to StatTraq. This was fairly easy to do: just adding the following line at around line 38 in the StatTraq plugin:

 if ($ipAddress=='217.159.201.131') $referrer='';

That should do the trick for this address. To be sure it doesn't happen anymore, I also banned referrers containing some words, giving this kind of rule :

  if ($ipAddress=='217.159.201.131' || ereg("Let|me|spare|you|these",$referrer)) $referrer='';

Another method I used is modify the Post Referrers plugin to use a Google redirection to link to the referers, so that spammers can't take advantage of my pagerank, which might hopefully deter them. Or am I too optimistic?

I hope that should do the trick. Please leave a comment if you notice that kind of stuff again, just in case I didn't pay enough attention...

Disponible sur Mozillazine

Ou bien lisez la version officielle.

J'ai installé StatTraq il y a quelques temps, et je voulais faire un petit point sur les navigateurs utilisés par les visiteurs (robots exclus). Il se trouve que la semaine dernière, Firefox a passé la barre des 2 millions de téléchargements, et la popularité croissante se retrouve dans les statistiques de ce site : l'image de droite montre les principaux naviagateurs ayant accédé ce blog du 23 septembre au 2 octobre 2004.

On voit clairement que, avec 67% des hits, Firefox n'est pas "un petit matelot", mais est bel et bien devenu un capitaine. Mozilla figure également en assez bonne posistion, mais pas Opera, ce qui est dommage car il s'agit également d'un très bon navigateur, surtout la version 7.60 qui est superbe, avec reconnaissance des commandes vocales, etc...

Sur l'image du bas, vous pouvez voir le classement des navigateurs depuis le 23 septembre 2004, réactualisé en direct.

After I got my GMail account, I wanted to transfer all my local emails there. Why? I don't know, beacause it doesn't seem like the best thing to do. I tried Mark Lyon's Google Mail Loader, but it kept locking up, so I wrote a little php script to read an mBox file and send the emails it contains one by one to a GMail account.

Copy the source from this page to a php file or get the gzip file, uncompress and host it on your own web site, but make sure no one has access to it, as it can be used to send span or whatever to any account. When you load it up in your browser, it will ask you for your GMail address and the mBox file to send. Click on 'go' and it starts sending your emails. It sends one every three seconds, so sending a whole database might take a while...

Téléchargez un lecteur de news (essayez Sage pour FireFox, ou FeedDemon pour Windows) et trainez y un de ces boutons. Vous devriez maintenant pouvoir lire ce blog sans y être connecté(e) et être mis(e) au courant lors des mises jour.

RSS c'est quoi ?

En anglais ça veut dire Really Simple Syndication, Syndication Très Facile. Les fichiers (ou flux) RSS sont écrits en XML et ne sont pas fait pour être vus avec votre navigateur, mais avec des aggrégateurs ou lecteurs de flux. En fait, il y a plus d'une version de RSS, mais les programmes les gèrent en général toutes, donc ne vous en souciez pas.

Au départ, la syndication de contenu a été conçue pour des sites d'information, où le fichier RSS contient le titre, la date et un résumé des dernières nouvelles. Ce flux d'informations peut alors être affiché sur un autre site.

Les Boutons

Ils vous emmènent directement aux fichiers RSS qui sont difficles lire dans un navigateur. Pour lire plus confortablment, trainez le bouton jusque sur votre 'aggrégateur', et le contenu du site apparaitra de manière lisible.

• pour les articles
• pour les résumés de tous les articles
• pour les commentaires de tous les articles

Aggrégateurs RSS

Il y en a énormément. Je vous conseille particulièrement l'extension Sage pour Firefox, qui a l'avantage de fonctionner sur la plupart des plateformes (Mac, Windows, Linux), ou bien consultez Google

En savoir plus

Je vous conseille l'article de Sébastien Lardière qui approfondit les explications, ou cette page, où vous pourrez tout savoir de Atom, RSS, etc...

Il y deux bonnes manières d'aider Firefox se distribuer plus largement : mettre un lien vers spreadfirefox.com sur votre page web, et donner des invitations GMail qui seront redistribuées aux personnes ayant mis un lien sur leur site. Une bonne initiative qui l'air de prendre comme de la poudre...

What if in a form I select a radio button by mistake, when I didn't want to make a choice? I guess I would just reload the page, or else hope that the designer put a 'reset' button.

Si vous souhaitez faire concevoir un site internet, que ce soit usage personnel ou professionnel, vous pourriez difficilement faire un meilleur choix que de nous le confier Jonathan Foucher.

En effet, que vous ayez besoin d'un site de présentation simple, comme un CV en ligne ou un blog (journal en ligne) ou d'un site commercial extremement complet, vous pourrez être assurés d'obtenir une présence internet qui soit la fois conforme aux standards, simple gérer, attractive et mise en ligne dans les délais les plus courts.

Quelques exemples de sites conçus récemment :

• Marginal Movies
• Marine Technologies Yacht Design
• Alfaric harps
• PrimaTerra
• Salamba
• Le blog du Réalisateur

Si vous souhaitez nous faire part de vos projets, n'hésitez pas nous contacter.