After talking to my colleague Stephen Readman about Apache virtual hosting (see www.itauthor.com/notes/archives/2004/12/getting_apache.html), he came up with the idea of using virtual hosting as a way of being able to browse to URLs that would normally not work outside a closed network.

I've taken his idea and tweaked the implementation of it, as follows.
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At some point, I really must get round to designing this weblog. There is some interesting information about using stylesheets on an MT blog here:

http://weblog.burningbird.net/archives/2004/06/30/mary-janes-and-site-design/

I like the idea of being able to choose your preferred style, particularly if the site uses a cookie to remember the style you chose for next time you visit.

But right now, I need to find out how to delete all the spam comments I've been getting. The standard design I chose for this blog when I set it up had a comment facility turned on. I didn't think it would get much use, but I thought there was no harm in having it there. WRONG! People set up irritating scripts that go around searching for weblog comment forms and post comments automatically with links to their sites (usually porn sites). Why? Well, when Google is working out how to rank sites found in a search it takes into consideration the number of other sites that link to the site. So the BBC get a high rank, because lots of sites contain links to the BBC website, but www.itauthor.com gets a low rank because (as of today) no one has linked to it.

So far I've found out how to remove comments in MT if your blog is saved in a mySQL database, but mine isn't (my ISP doesn't allow it) so I need to keep looking. I will also remove the comments form.

What I'm also looking for is a form that will email comments to me, so that I can vet them and add them to the blog if I choose. I could write this myself in Perl, but there must be an MT module out there that I can use.

The following link is nothing to do with technical authoring and only marginally anything to do with IT (in that it's a really nicely designed site – using MovableType):

http://bigwhiteguy.com

I stumbled upon this interesting (bloggish) site while writing a tender response for a possible customer out in Hong Kong. I wanted to use some plausible Chinese names in the search examples I'm including and Google threw up this site. Lovely design!

It reminds me (again) that I really must get round to redesigning these pages.

Yesterday I finally got a cable broadband connection installed. This meant setting up an old PC with Smoothwall to act as a dedicated firewall. All went pretty well, but initially I couldn't get my internet connection through the Smoothwall machine, so I reinstalled Smoothwall. Turns out that Smoothwall wasn't the problem - the problem was that in switching the cable modem from one machine to the Smoothwall machine I hadn't turned off the modem, waited a couple of minutes for it to forget the MAC address and switch on again. Anyway, when I reinstalled Smoothwall, Firebird complained about the new certificate it got sent. I needed to get rid of the existing certificate in order to be able to accept the new one. However, Firebird doesn't have the facility to manage certificates ... UNLESS you install an extension called:

Things They Left Out

You can install TTLO from
http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/more-info/ttlo

After install and restarting Firebird, you get a More Options option in the Tools menu. I opened this up and deleted the existing Smoothwall certificate. Then, when I tried to get to the config pages on my Smoothwall machine up popped the dialog box asking me if I wanted to accept the certificate that was being offered.

Sweet!
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I've always thought that using tables for laying out a Web page was an irritating and ugly workaround. CSS offers a more palatable solution. There are still problems, however, but these sites show some of the possibilities:

www.bluerobot.com/web/layouts – The Layout Resevoir
glish.com/css – Look Ma, No Tables