Thanks to John Gruber’s post on his new Preferences page, I now know why I keep seeing the URLs of various porn sites in my referrers log, as if these porn sites were actually referring to my blog pages. It turns out that it’s apparently a spam-like strategy intended to increase the page ranking of […]
This is for Betalogue readers who have submitted or are interested in submitting comments on any of my Betalogue pages. The pMachine blogging system that I use guarantees the privacy of your contact information. When you submit registration information along with your comment, you have several options: provide a name and email address, but no […]
pMachine, the company that makes the blogging software that I use, has just announced their next-generation product called ExpressionEngine. It sounds good, but… It’s going to be a significantly more expensive product ($199 vs $45!), and will require quite a bit of work for existing pMachine users who want to “upgrade” their blog, because the […]
I have been looking at ways to improve the visual appearance of quoted passages in my blog for a while now. After a certain amount of head-scratching, I have come to the conclusion that I might as well establish my own rules and not worry too much about “standards compliance”. The core problem is that, […]
This question is for Betalogue readers who have contributed comments to this blog and have checked the box to be notified by email of any replies to their own comments. Have you ever received two copies of the notification emails? Do you always get two copies? Do you never received two copies? This is the […]
I don’t know why, but my “Recent Comments” box (on the right-hand side of the home page) is not working right. Normally, when you hover over one of the date/time links, the title of the corresponding blog entry should show up either in a tool tip (Camino/Mozilla) or in the window’s status bar (Safari). Right […]
blockquote closing tagFor those readers who accessed Betalogue in the past 18 hours or so using Safari, my apologies for the screwed-up look of the home page. For some reason, one of the recently posted blog entries was missing a closing blockquote tag — and Safari didn’t like that at all. Explorer and Camino were not affected. […]
The debate over whether links with a target=”_blank” attribute, i.e. links that force the browser to open the corresponding page in a new window, will probably never be settled for good. I personally use the target=”_blank” attribute for links to external sites, i.e. pages outside my own domain. I can fully understand the argument that […]
Just so you know, I’ve been experimenting with favicons a bit more, and have now created what I believe is a version of my favicon for Betalogue that has a transparent background and should include two sizes: 16×16 and 32×32 pixels. Right now, when I check my site with Camino and Safari, they are still […]
Since I moved from my Radio UserLand blog system to pMachine back in July 2003, I have had a backlog of things that need to be done to clean up the entire blog archive. Here’s a short update. At this point, all my Radio blog entries have been added to the pMachine database. This means […]
Mark Pilgrim has a scary entry about weblog spam… Makes you want to stay small… really small….
I’ve now added redirects so that this blog can easily be accessed using shorter URLs. The following URLs are now all redirected to the Betalogue home page: http://betalogue.latext.com http://www.latext.com/betalogue/ As well, I have registered and parked the domain name betalogue.com (you never know) and now the following URL: https://www.betalogue.com is automatically redirected to the LATEXT […]
My apologies to Betalogue readers for the disruption of the past 24 hours or so. A combination of server problems and backup recovery issues caused the contents of the blog to disappear for a while. Things should be back to normal now, except that some non-7-bit characters in reader comments are not encoded properly. I […]
As you must have noticed if you read this blog on the web, the Betalogue home page now features a new “Recent Comments” box on the right-hand side of your web browser window. It automatically lists compact excerpts of the 5 most recent comments posted anywhere by anyone on the blog. Each excerpt is followed […]
Some time ago I wrote that I had added a “printer-friendly version” link below each Betalogue entry. As a reader rightfully pointed out to me, although a very common approach, this was not the most elegant way of handling the screen-friendly vs. print-friendly issue for my web pages. The “right” way to do this is […]