Setting Up a 301 Redirect

Instead of having to bother with a plethora of settings in cPanel itself, I came up with the following to stick at the top of .htaccess. A quick look around on the Internet brought up Fayaz Miraz’s blog, but while the solution suggestion was close, it misses one crucial aspect: it only redirects from the main page as far as I can tell. This is fixed easily by the addition of $1 (i.e. everything that was added after the main page).

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^fransdejonge\.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://fransdejonge.com/$1 [R=301,L]

</IfModule>

Simply put, it matches all possible routes of approach (whether through www or through a subdomain of another domain) and if it’s not fransdejonge.com, it will 301 redirect to fransdejonge.com. The L means no further rewriting will occur after that rule. Mostly because it would just be inefficient, and partially because something else further down the line might mess things up.

Preventing .htaccess Hell

Another problem is that cPanel automatically creates a /public_html/addondomain directory. This is bad, because /public_html already contains a .htaccess file for the main domain. When accessing /public_html/addondomain, it would first parse the .htaccess file in /public_html before moving on and overriding it in /public_html/addondomain, and that’s assuming none of the rules in /public_html make anything go awry!

To prevent this kind of nightmare from occurring I took the simple precaution of creating a new directory /domains. This domain is contained in /domains/fransdejonge.com, for instance, and any other add-on or subdomains can reside in their own /domains/domain.com directory to prevent any added load from needlessly parsing .htaccess files.

All of that was about a month ago. I’ve only got a small selection of feeds in there so far, but since I’m still catching up on literally months of old material, that’s not an issue as of now. Aside from Wil Wheaton’s, my favorite podcast right now is Stuff You Should Know. But enough about that.

When I was younger, I usually listened to the radio news at 7 or 8 AM while eating breakfast. I have long since switched to doing some quick reading of my e-mails and feeds, but that’s not the ideal way to get a quick update on what’s currently going on. The radio news does a better job of that, but it just feels too much like a waste of time. Cue the podcast. I’ve known that Dutch public radio has had its broadcasts available as podcasts since 2005 or so. Selecting the podcast most relevant to me was easy: Radio Netherlands Worldwide, specifically the Nieuwslijn (news line) program. Of course there are competitors, such as BBC’s Global News and the German ARD Tagesschau, and I may have missed some other potentially interesting sources—which would presumably mostly mean American or Flemish—, but for now I’m sticking with this. Alas, there’s one small problem: there’s a news broadcast just about each two hours. This makes the new episodes available dialog look rather cluttered. I only want to listen to the news once a day.

New episodes available in gPodder

That’s where Yahoo Pipes comes in. When I start it, it complains about Opera, but I haven’t been able to discern any difference in functionality between Opera and Firefox on the site. In only a couple of minutes, I have something that only gives me the 8 o’clock news.

If I wanted, I could easily add the BBC and ARD feeds and also strip them to just one item a day. What I can’t do, however, is output the de facto standard <itunes:image href="http://some-picture" /> with the feed. Nevertheless, I can manually link up a picture in gPodder so it doesn’t look strange in the feed display list.

For things more complicated than such simplistic mash-ups, Yahoo Pipe’s graphical programming interface quickly becomes lacking, which is strange considering that it seems to aspire to be more than just a simple mash-up tool. Nevertheless, it certainly makes life a little easier.

Install Google in English user script.

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="some-vector-image.svg" type="type="image/svg+xml">

I’m especially surprised that Google Chrome doesn’t support this. They do the whole web application thing; which utilizes the favicons of sites as application icons. SVG would be perfect to also offer a nice larger size icon. Another thing I didn’t know is that IE7 still doesn’t support PNGs as favicons.

Last, but not least, here is the favicon I created in the end: .

Apperently submitting a bug report to Microsoft is a whole lot harder.

Via Sushubh.

SpreadIE.com is the logical answer to spreadFirefox.com. Firefox helps communist nations, switch back to IE! The content on the site is too obviously fake to be funny though.

Then there’s IE7.com. I consider it quite a brilliant action by whoever bought the domain.

Meanwhile, Opera Mini is the only Opera related thing I’ve been spreading lately. Everybody in my circle of friends already switched to Firefox or Opera, so there seems little left to be done.

For this stylesheet to work you need the root signature UserJS, which has been rendered obsolete with Opera 9. I still used this method however because I already have it working, there is no nice UI for it yet and I was too lazy to alter all of my user stylesheets. Just consider this a pro if you’re using Firefox, because right now it’s still quite compatible…

On another note, I still have to add something to my stylesheet to style stuff like this.

/* torrentspy stylesheet */
/* hide everything from "informing text" to ads which isn't required for looking for torrents */
html.moose.ts .adspace-top, html.moose.torrentspy .adspace-top,
html.moose.ts .adspace-middle, html.moose.torrentspy .adspace-middle,
html.moose.ts .adspace-side, html.moose.torrentspy .adspace-side,
html.moose.ts #fiSearchForm, html.moose.torrentspy #fiSearchFor,
html.moose.ts #header, html.moose.torrentspy #header,
html.moose.ts #footer, html.moose.torrentspy #footer,
html.moose.ts #stats, html.moose.torrentspy #stats,
html.moose.ts .content h2:first-child, html.moose.torrentspy .content h2:first-child,
html.moose.ts .content h2+p, html.moose.torrentspy .content h2+p,
html.moose.ts #search img[alt="Search"], html.moose.torrentspy #search  img[alt="Search"],
html.moose.ts #search-nav .help, html.moose.torrentspy #search-nav .help,
html.moose.ts #search-nav img[alt="Get Firefox Plugin"], html.moose.torrentspy #search-nav  img[alt="Get Firefox Plugin"],
html.moose.ts img[width="700"], html.moose.torrentspy  img[width="700"],
/* www.torrentspy.com unique, hide the stupid shout stuff */
html.moose.torrentspy .ShoutFrameBody, html.moose.torrentspy .sub-cols {display:none}
/* put the search in the right position */
html.moose.ts #search, html.moose.torrentspy #search {padding:1em}
	html.moose.ts #search .f_field, html.moose.torrentspy #search .f_field {border:1px solid #000}
/* alter the submit buttons to something (a little) better */
html.moose.ts #search .f_button, html.moose.torrentspy #search .f_button,
html.moose.ts #image1, html.moose.torrentspy #image1
{content:"Go";padding:2px;border:1px solid #000}
/* replace ugly images with text */
html.moose.ts #search-nav img[alt="Latest Torrents"], html.moose.torrentspy #search-nav  img[alt="Latest Torrents"]
{content:"Latest Torrents"}
html.moose.ts #search-nav img[alt="RSS Feed"], html.moose.torrentspy #search-nav img[alt="RSS Feed"]
{content:"RSS Feed"}
/* position in a better place */
html.moose.ts #search-nav, html.moose.torrentspy #search-nav
{position:absolute;top:0;left:500px;border:1px solid #000;border-width:0 1px 1px}
/* some general styles */
html.moose.ts, html.moose.torrentspy,
html.moose.ts body, html.moose.torrentspy body,
html.moose.ts #page, html.moose.torrentspy #page
{background:#d4e1f0;color:#000;font:1em/1.2 "Trebuchet MS", serif, georgia;text-align:left;line-height:1.5em;height:100%;margin:0;padding:0}
/* position user stuff in a better place */
html.moose.ts #col-right, html.moose.torrentspy #col-right
{position:absolute;top:0;right:0}
/* remove stupid background and such */
html.moose.ts #login-nav, html.moose.torrentspy #login-nav,
html.moose.ts #login-nav ul, html.moose.torrentspy #login-nav ul,
html.moose.ts #login-nav ul li, html.moose.torrentspy #login-nav ul li
{margin:0;padding:0 1em 0;background:#fff;border:0;display:inline}
/* make page smaller */
html.moose.ts #container, html.moose.torrentspy #container,
html.moose.ts #page, html.moose.torrentspy #page
{width:750px;}
/* put a border around it for clarity */
html.moose.ts #cols, html.moose.torrentspy #cols
{background:#fff;margin-bottom:10px;display:block;height:100%;border:1px solid black;border-width:0 1px 1px}

I took a look around the various categories and most of them are pretty good pictures. I am not sure about the exact copyrights on any of them, as I couldn’t find any pictures labeled with any of the descriptions which are on the about page of the site. I suppose I’ll take a new fresh look tomorrow at that aspect of the site tomorrow after a good night’s sleep.

Luckily as far as the design is concerned I haven’t yet managed to break anything in IE (although the gravatars are a pixel off). I might go with alpha-transparant PNG’s though for some of the transparancy effects, as that would certainly make a much smaller image load and it would make things look somewhat less prettier in IE. After all, I do want people to switch to Firefox, Opera, Safari or whatever else isn’t so annoying to anyone who wants to do a little bit more with CSS.

If you take a look around in my CSS file you’ll notice that I’m trying something new. Over the past half year I switched from full CSS to very compact CSS, but that’s not really a difference. The thing I’m experimenting with here is to indent those properties which are basically a sort of subproperties of a certain thing to increase readability. I must say it’s already working out quite well.

So drop your suggestions now, as this is the layout I plan to extend on in the close future.