Early Modern Notes

You may remember that I got slightly miffed the other week about some one hotlinking an image on EMR (which has not stopped, by the way, although as that URL no longer points to that image it suggests that they haven’t actually looked at the profile in some time…).

Thanks to misteraitch at Giornale Nuovo, I discovered that it’s in fact quite easy to block hotlinking through my control panel (hadn’t even noticed that there!). So, still being pro-active for the weekend, I have activated Hotlink Protection, which means that no one can hotlink to images on this site - including the blog - unless I specifically allow it.

If you are hotlinking one of my own images (such as the documents) for reasonable, limited educational purposes, and for some reason you aren’t in a position to download a copy to your own server (which I am quite happy for you to do, though with proper credit, please), get in touch to explain and I may well put you on the privileged list.

I fear, however, that the anti-spam may be overdoing it. It has caught one spam comment today, but also a legit one. So if a few of my regular readers would care to send a short comment so we can put it to the test… Update: It’s okay, I know why it did it. But you could always send a message to say Hi anyway…

Quick PS: I managed to forget to enable my own hotlink to the original EMN blog. What an eejit…

I’ve finally started to list at EMR some of the links that I’ve been posting here over the summer - though so far they’ve only got as far as the New Links page. But it’s a start.

Given the size of EMR these days (not to mention the difficulties I often have deciding what pages to put things into, seeing as I try to avoid duplication), I’ve been giving some thought to converting it to a database format (and it occurred to me that it might be possible to adapt WordPress to do it). But I don’t know how much work it would take; I have no idea how many items are listed there now… And I don’t have time to learn PHP and so on from scratch (I’m gradually learning to tinker around the edges, but that’s all), so I would need some kind of database software. Has anyone reading this converted a resource-heavy website like EMR from static HTML to the dynamic database format, with the minimum of techie know-how? Are there any useful ‘how-to’ websites out there? Is it possible to use WP in that way? Or are there better (cheap or free…) programs for that kind of job? This is likely to be a long term project, if it ever happens at all. But I’m starting to think it might work better than the current set up.

This is probably me being anal, but I’m going to be pro-active about the spam comments business, on the principle that it can only get worse and an hour or two put in now may save me a lot of hassle later. So this weekend’s blog housekeeping will include installing some fixes that won’t affect your viewing and commenting pleasure (or make extra work for me; no way am I introducing comment moderation as standard). I’ve already done a couple of easy things in the admin interface. But the main things I have in mind this weekend:

1) there’s apparently a plugin I can install to close comments after a certain period of time (although I haven’t found a link to download it yet…)

2) a little trickery from the WP support forums to keep away autospammers (it involves renaming the comments file, and looks easy enough)

3) try out the comment spam blacklist that I’ve also seen references to

Not that I’ll be able to tell whether any of it works, really; but if anyone has had miraculous results with something that was simple to implement, I’d like to know.

Also: I swear that I recently found an section in the admin interface where you could set how much time has to elapse before a commenter can post a comment (to the same thread) again (the correct term, I now know, is ‘timeout’). But now I can’t find it. Did I imagine it?

And by the way, if you’re getting a lot of email spam from your website (or possibly even from email links in your comments on blogs), I already have something to fix it in use on EMR: the obfuscator. It works: I now get almost no spam to that address. Happy about that.

Update I have done 1 (definitely works) and 3 (hopefully works). Comments will be closed after 30 days; I don’t think I’ve ever had a comment after that length of time! I’m not sure about doing 2, however. If I rename my comments.php file so that spammers won’t recognize it, well, I can’t easily recognise it either, can I? What if I forget what I renamed it to? (I have now done it anyway; it’s still recognisable to me, but should fool a bot.) And for WP’ers out there who are concerned about these things, this page contains all the solutions.

Does it mean you’ve really arrived in the blog world when you get your first spam comment? (Rapidly deleted.) And is it all downhill from here?

Thanks to wolfangel, I have a cute gravatar. (Though not as cute as either wolfangel’s or Harrison’s.) No prizes for guessing what it is. I plan to install the plugin at this blog over the weekend so you’ll soon be able to see it in my comments here anyway.

One downside: the urge to keep posting daft comments just so you can see your picture again… Wolfangel, what have you started here?

My web host cordially informs me that they’ll be doing server upgrades tomorrow, Friday 24 September between 1300 and 0100GMT. This means that at some point during the day - not for more than 20 minutes, they say - this site (and email) will be inaccessible. So don’t panic if you can’t get in; just come back later.

I have my fingers crossed.

Update: it would seem that no more than 20 minutes on Friday the 24th should in fact have been translated as at least an hour on Sunday the 26th… Ah well.

On a more positive note, of course, apart from checking out abuse of the site, it’s fun to browse the stats and discover visitors I hadn’t noticed before, and see where people come from and what they most often visit. A page on early modern dress and fashion is unexpectedly popular, but I suppose that tells you something about the popularity of re-enactment. There’s something humbling about referrals from sites in languages I can’t understand (but who obviously understand mine). Sadly, no entertaining search terms. (You’d think with all the sex and violence lurking around on the site…)

… sooner or later, I suppose. Which is not to say that I’m not really pissed off about it.

It occurred to me, for the first time in far too long, to take a look at my site statistics this morning. Well, there was some good news. EMN got over 6000 hits in August (so perhaps I’m doing something right).

But what’s top of the hit list? A single image from one of my EMR pages (Women’s lives in the British Civil Wars). And we’re talking heavy usage by EMR standards: 8000+ hits in August - 14% of the total for the site. Uh-oh.

Now if I tell you that this image is titled ‘colchester’ and on scrolling down a little further I find that my top referring site is the Colchester United Football Club supporters’ message boards, does the penny start to drop?

Unfortunately that link doesn’t take me directly to the threads in which the image must be appearing (and you know what? I couldn’t be bothered to investigate further): but my deduction is that some bloody poster (or even posters) to the message boards has taken the liberty of using my image, directly accessed from my server, as a signature logo for their posts. I can’t see how anything else would produce such heavy use, unless anyone has any bright ideas. As I say, I’m not wasting my time looking.

This is not merely rude; it’s theft. I’m not talking intellectual property or anything abstract here. I’m talking about my bandwidth, which I pay for. OK, I’m nowhere near my bandwidth limits and it’s a tiddly .gif, but it’s the principle of the thing. I probably wouldn’t mind an image being used this way for, say, a teacher’s course resources that would be used by a relatively limited number of people, for an educational purpose. But this is something else altogether.

What should I do about it? In fact, what I’ve done for the time being is simple but drastic (and rather frustrating): I’ve deleted the image from the server. It’s only one picture out of several on the page, hardly crucial to the effect, and I have at least got some pleasure out of imagining the surprise someone will be getting. I’d like to put it back at some point under a different filename, but I’m worried they’ll just find it and do the same thing again. (In which case, I’m thinking I might re-rename it and then make an image with a rude message for the URL they’re accessing, but maybe I shouldn’t give in to such a childish impulse…) I don’t know whether it would be worth contacting the moderators of the message boards. I’d be grateful for advice from anyone who’s experienced this.

Update: In response to Ancarett’s suggestion, the colchester.gif is now a little message saying ‘Host your own images!’ (takes up less than a KB), and the original image has been renamed. Now I can only wait and see if this person does it again… I really must be more conscientious about checking the site stats in future!

If you can’t get access to archive pages at the moment, me neither, and it’s because I’m trying to do the smart permalinks thing, which seems to cause nearly everyone trouble… Back to the support forum I go… Bah.

Ten minutes later… Still no joy, and I swear that I can’t see what’s wrong. The scripty thing that does the rewrite works, as you can see in the status bar if you point at the link. Path looks right, I think, and the .htaccess file looks good compared to the ‘do it this way’ posts at the support forum.

Bloody bloody bloody hell. And I wanted to do a good resources post today, not get bogged down in code stuff.

Another ten minutes… Well, I found one way that seems to work, but I’m not sure that I like it too much (that extra /index.php/ in the URL), or that it should be necessary. But if it works, what the hell… Individual, monthly and category links all seem to take you where they should and it’s getting too hot to worry about it any more.

I don’t know what effect this has on any hyperlinks you may have created to the original archive URLs, whether they still work or not.

Next task: stats plug-in (OK, will leave that for a bit. The readme makes my brain hurt). And page-by-page navigation (that sounds like another thing that can go horribly wrong… and for single post pages has just turned out to be really really easy, thanks to the scripty goddess! But for archive pages, hmm, more complicated…) And another look at that menu column in Netscape. Any requests?

OK, I checked out how the blog looked in different browsers on the same computer screen. What I’ve only just been able to do is look at it on another, smaller, screen, and it doesn’t fit properly, dammit. The thing is slightly too wide and it’s pushing the right menu bar down to the bottom of the screen (this is in IE). Sorry to anyone with a small laptop who’s having this problem.

Now I’m going to have to look up my HTML to check out how to size this properly. It shouldn’t be that difficult, but the trouble is that I probably won’t be able to check whether it works until I’m back in Aber at the end of the month…

Addendum: It occurs to me that the size of the image might be the problem. Hmm. Nope. But I can’t see what the problem in fact is. The column widths in the template have been done as percentages, so they should work on any size screen, shouldn’t they? (If just 2 columns can be this awkward, I really don’t feel like trying 3.)

Update (4 August): Fixed, I think, by narrowing the right menu column slightly. But while it looks fine on IE and Opera, it’s not quite so nice in Netscape: the menu now looks rather cramped with a lot of space between the columns. Do any NN viewers find it unattractive? It’s partly because the the column as a whole appears narrower, and partly because the lists are much more sharply indented than in either IE or Opera. I don’t know why it’s doing either of those things… Shall have to investigate.

Welcome to the new EMN. Don’t forget to change bookmarks and feeds.

I’m still tweaking things around a bit, but it looks good to go. I haven’t tried working out how to make the URLs nice for archive posts yet; I read those particular instructions and ran away for the time being. I’m also dithering over whether to have 3 columns, but it’s a bit very complicated. I also haven’t attempted to import posts from the Blogger original, and don’t know whether I’ll bother or not. Until (if) I do, I’ll keep a link on this page for reference purposes.

Update: Just remembered to check it out in Netscape and Opera as well as IE, and it looks OK (slightly different, as is to be expected, but nothing nasty). If you’re using a different browser and it looks weird in any way, let me know and I’ll see what I can do. I should probably also check that the HTML for the template still validates after my tinkerings, I suppose.