DougWeb – Doug's home on the Web

As I write this, the visitor counter (not pages, not hits – visits) is displaying 2000724. That’s two million seven hundred and twenty four visitors visits to my site in the past 3years 3 months.

That’s quite a lot.

So thanks to you all.

Apart from Planet Doug which has ‘Bigger Issues’ (like not updating…), I think I’ve got everything switched over successfully to the new design.

I’ve also moved my blog to the front page of the site – the front page was just a waste of space before.

…so I’m designing something better. I hope to finish tomorrow.

A few minutes ago, DougWeb racked up visit #1000000. That’s a lot of visitors. Thanks to you all!

I’m going to stop madly hitting refresh on the visit count now…¹

¹The visit count doesn’t include me…

See the sidebar…

Apparently I had 96,145 visitors to my site last month.

That means that the total number of visitors since I launched the site has now passed 500,000.

That’s a quite a lot of people.

It’s been a little low recently, so I’m going to make an effort to post something more frequently.

I’m not dead

It looks like February saw record traffic coming to DougWeb – with over 35,000 visitors. And that’s with February having 3 days less than the ‘average’ month. It also saw DougWeb clock up it’s 250,000th visit in less than 2 years – traffic I never dreamed of when I started the site with just a list of my DVDs, and some links to other sites (both still present, if not updated regularly). Makes me realise just how ‘big’ the internet is!

Good? Bad? Love to know what you think.

I’m currently in the early stages of a minor redesign for DougWeb. IE6 is holding me back with a collection of bugs I’ve never seen before, and hope never to see again once I’ve figured out the cause. Normally IE bugs take the form of let’s put this in a weird place. This can be dealt with by telling IE something ‘wrong’ that happens to create the intended effect. But not this time. A partial list of problems I’m encountering include:

1. Content not showing until you scroll past it, and back.
2. Backgrounds showing behind text, but not in the gaps between paragraphs
3. Any attempt to change the styling on a link when hovering over it, currently results in the entire page contents shifting down about 20,000px.

An example of the current IE crazyness is included below. Neither Firefox, Opera, Safari or Konquerer do anything remotely like this. But that’s not exactly a surprise…

It seems that the styling I used in a post recently, broke the sidebar. I hadn’t realised this, since I don’t use Internet Explorer except when I have to. It’s now fixed.

Despite the tons of examples and docs, mod_rewrite is voodoo. Damned cool voodoo, but still voodoo.

Brian Moore

These words feature on the official Apache documentation for this very useful server tool. And they aren’t wrong!

I do however now possess a more-than-workable-grasp of the dark arts.

mod_rewrite for the 99.99% of you who don’t have a clue what I’m talking about, let’s me ‘rewrite’ the URLs your browser requests, depending on certain conditions – e.g. if I move the location of files on the server, I can ‘rewrite’ links pointing on the old location so that they still work.

It is indeed damn cool.

It seems that on October 8th, the site went through the 100,000 visit barrier.

Wow.

Named in Planet tradition, and not through sheer ego, I’m releasing Planet Doug to the world.

What is Planet Doug I hear you ask?

Planet is a feed aggregator (i.e. it takes blog postings from numerous sources, and makes them accessible at a single point). Planet Doug simply takes the most recent posts of the people featured in the sidebar (in my brand spanking new blogroll), and makes a single page from them for easy perusal. Mainly a tool for my own convenience, it also lets anyone nosy enough gain an insight into my psyche through the presence/absence of feeds on a certain topic.

That’s if anyone cares.

Since (a) I get more Safari visitors than visitors using Opera, Netscape or Mozilla and (b) I can actually test on different versions, rather than ‘hope for the best’, I’ve hacked together another AWStats modification.

This one was more difficult than those I put together a month ago, since Safari doesn’t identify its version to a website – only it’s build – that is – Safari/312 is really Safari 1.3, and Safari/85 is really Safari 1.0. So after extracting the all-important-number, a comparison then has to be made against a list containing build number->version information (thanks Wikipedia!). This will also mean that whenever Apple release a new version, I’ll have to update the list*. The code for Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera et. al will continue to work as long as the information is kept in the same format e.g. Firefox/xxx isn’t changed at some point to Firefox (xxx).

* I do have fallback code, so if an unknown build is found, it will report the build number instead. I’d love to know why Apple chose to identify the Safari version in use, but in such a non-obvious way…

Not only does the official IVS Knowledge Base suck for ‘knowledge’, the incredibly bad forum search makes looking elsewhere extremely difficult.

So I’ve added one to the resource centre. At the moment, it sucks too – default mediawiki theme, and only a single article. Hopefully, it’ll take off.

The other day I blogged about getting visits from ‘Opera/9′, one of which originated from the headquarters of Opera Software, leading me to speculate that the next version was going to get a major bump to it’s version number. I’m now received a visit from ‘Opera/8.50′ – again from Opera’s headquarters in Norway.

So what is the next version? 8.50 or 9? Does anyone know?

Without my upgrade to AWStats, I’d never have noticed these 2 gems revealed here!

1. There are still people using IE 5 and 6 betas. People using 5.0 and 5.5, I can put down to user apathy / company policies. But leaving a beta version installed, when the full product has been out 4 or more years, seems odd to me. Oh well – it’s sub-0.1% of visitors.

2. The next version of Opera appears to be version 9. The current version is 8.02, so that’s quite a version leap, given the small version bumps of recent history. Normally when I see a version number that isn’t ‘right’ (e.g. ‘Firefox/reset’), I’ll go into the raw logs, and do a manual examination. If it looks suspicious (e.g. a spammer), I then exclude the visitor from the summaries, in the same way I exclude myself. 2 things stand out about this one though that make me think it’s genuine. The logs reveal 2 visits from Opera/9…

   1. The first occurence was a visit directed at a testcase I created for one of their QA staff, regarding a bug in Opera.

      This visit is listed in my logs as

      84.48.74.200 – - [22/Aug/2005:18:45:03 -0400] “GET /wp/?page_id=121 HTTP/1.1″ 200 3761 “-” “Opera/9.00 (X11; Linux i686; U; en)”

      84.48.74.200 is an IP address registered to an ISP in Oslo, Norway where Opera Software is located. An Opera employee would certainly have access to pre-release versions…Suspicions reduced, I moved on to the 2nd visit.

   2. Visit 2 also confined itself to the aforementioned testcase, and is listed in my logs as

      213.236.208.22 – - [26/Aug/2005:06:14:01 -0400] “GET /wp/?page_id=121 HTTP/1.1″ 200 3765 “-” “Opera/9.0 (Windows NT 5.1; U; en)”

      213.236.208.22 is an IP address registered to Opera Software ASA. Good enough for me!

I’ve completed my modifications to the way the stats are generated, and the stats are slowly coming back up. The only thing holding them back now is time – I have to reprocess each configuration/month combo individually. 16 Resource Centre configurations (1/resource) x 7 months since February = a while.

Stats are unavailable for a couple of days, while I try to expand the ability of AWStats to break down various browser versions. It currently handles IE/Firefox/Netscape, and I want to expand that to include Opera and Mozilla. I also want details of developmental versions – e.g. developmental versions of Firefox in the 9 months since 1.0 are versioned as 1.0+, but are being listed simply as 1.0 currently.

Since I’ve never written any perl before, and AWStats is a bloated mess of code (according to those who do know perl, it’ll be interesting. I’m hoping that 90% of it will be copy/paste.