Recently in Deef's Net Category

I’ve been remiss in posting some of the weird and wonderful searches that people use to get to this site. It’s because I moved the site from one computer to another back in March, and hadn’t installed the log-reading software until last night, when I was reading a site from a Googler whose domain name would really have people wondering about my late-night browsing habits.

She had an article on odd searches that people used to find her site, which prompted me to get the software installed, since it’s usually a form of entertainment for me, too.

Perhaps the most surprising thing is that an increasing number of the searches are actually leading to posts and pages that are useful. I wrote a few obscure tips/hacks about Thunderbird a little while ago, thinking something along the line of “none of the people who read this site even use Thunderbird… Why am I doing this, exactly?” But, it turns out that people who use Thunderbird also use Google (whoulda thunk?), and run across the same problems I do.

The short microphone review I wrote years ago still tends to be one of the most common searches, and there are a lot of people who want to know the value of betrayal money in biblical times vs. modern-day times. Caveat: My pastor and I have apparently come to different conclusions, based on a sermon from a couple of months ago, so I should probably recheck my sources, but I still think my conclusion is right, or at least highly plausible. But I’m not going to get into a theological debate over it.

But, notwithstanding those people who find this site useful, there are still a ton of searches for which I’m apparently authoritative, but either have nothing to say, or haven’t said it yet. I’ll fill in some of the gaps here:

• While I’m no longer showing up as a top site for pictures of Panama City Beach, FL (finally!), people looking for the history of PDAs in general are probably somewhat disappointed to find my personal PDA history, even if it does follow the evolution of PDAs fairly well. It’s consistently in the top 10, if not the top 6.

• “What is a Dell warranty?” I think it involves something about them fixing your computer when it breaks.

• “What does deef stand for?” His wife, really good performances (though without getting into the whole ‘every performance deserves a standing ovation’ bit), working at the inserter and stamper, printing envelopes, and bringing mail from office to car and car to post office. He sits for programming, reading, driving the car, playing games, and dinner.

• “Total of deef people in the US” Two: Deef and Deefwife. There are no little deefs.

• “Fort Collins 9-digit ZIP Code” Umm, there are a lot. As of April, 26,685 of them, in fact. 80521-1000 is the first one, numerically. 80528-9700 is the highest in sequence, though there’s a company in Fort Collins that has all of 80553.

• “addresses of pastors who want to give out things to people” I’m curious what inspired that.

• “my hope is built on nothing less” Alas, I hope the lyrics they found here didn’t make it into their hymnal (copy and paste the text into the search bar on this site to find out why).

• “deef killer” Not something that you’ll find out how to do on this site, let me tell you!

• “potable sound system” I’m generally more interested in making my sound system small than making it fit for drinking, but kudos to the search engine that figured out that the searcher was probably thinking (if not typing) the same thing.

• “adult” I have no idea how I managed to rank for that one. There can’t be any shortage of other sites vying for the word.

• “hearing problems from running pitney bowes inserter” Good question. My impression is that it’s not loud enough to cause permanent hearing damage unless you’re running it for an extended period of time. It’s probably worth doing some measurements on, though. I’ll do that and post what I come up with.

• “can unshielded speakers crash computer?” They’d have to have some pretty intense magnets to do that. Especially since, for most people, the speakers are next to the monitor, not the computer.

• “things in a souvenir shop beginning with the letter d” It’s on the tip of my tongue! D… D… Oh, let me search for it. Google knows everything, right?

• “with this stick and my highly evolved brain i shall make fire” What a great movie. The second one wasn’t as good, though I still enjoyed Scrat.

• “is deef a word?” Of course! Proper names are perfectly valid words.

• “communicate with deef people” E-Mail is preferred. As is English, though you can get by with a number of other languages if I’m allowed to use a translator.

• “helpful phases for the newly wed couple” Other than the fact that I have no idea how this person got here, I might offer “<pat> <pat> it’ll be alright.” A serious answer is beyond the scope of this post.

• “was saul a tax collector” Nope. That was Matthew/Levi.

• “what are some things that happen only at midnight?” Date changes.

I’ve been evaluating Drupal as a hosting platform for about a year and a half now, and have been using it to run Deef’s Net for about half a year. This is the first platform that hasn’t made me itch to change back to my homemade Mason system — in fact, if I did so at this point, I’d definitely be losing out.

So, my plan is to dive in and get as familiar with it as I can, so that I can host it effectively for others (unlike many hosts who just set up a CMS and leave the customer to figure it out). The result is that Deef’s Net is probably going to undergo some layout changes over the coming days and weeks, since it’s much more fun and rewarding to play with a live site than an artificial testing site, and since it really doesn’t matter a whole lot if Deef’s Net looks correct or has all of its content at any given time of day it’s okay that I’m testing on a production site.

To get started, I’ve been playing with themes, since this is not one of my strongest points. This new Deef’s Net layout/theme is more or less what I had at midnight last night, which was followed by three frustrating and ultimately unsuccessful hours trying to get a flexible div-only layout to work properly, and that wasn’t even trying to do it cross-browser, just Firefox. So, since I wanted to get some sleep last night, this layout has one table for the sidebars (not that there are any on the vast majority of pages right now if you’re not logged in, but that’ll be coming next). Changing font sizes also doesn’t work as well as it does on my prayer letter site (which didn’t have multiple columns or Drupal to worry about, so it was simpler). For some reason, the YUI grids failed miserably out of the box, so I’m 0/2 on that. Presumably there’s something in the Drupal default CSS file that’s causing problems, but I couldn’t figure out what.

More changes to come!

Looking over the server logs for June, I think most people found what they were looking for when visiting this site (I’d still like to beef up the sound system section, since that accounts for a lot of visits). There are always a few search terms that make me smile, though, and these three win for last month:

• “aid for deef people” (we’re long past the possibility of being helped…)
• “happy envelope” (especially amusing given that it isn’t one of my other sites)
• “daily earthquakes” (an unfortunate side effect of living near a construction site)

Incidentally, the daily earthquakes have stopped, and we now have an industrial-strength woodpecker as they’re putting up the walls, beams, and such, but since I moved into an office 10 minutes away, it hasn’t been a problem.

That city in Florida that I’m not mentioning in the hopes that it’ll eventually fall of the caches of every search engine ever is still four of the top ten search strings…

Oh, and who’s visiting this site from Newfoundland on at least a halfway regular basis? Identify yourself! Especially if I know you!

Brian just posted a list of weird search terms that result in his site being listed in various search engines. I never cease to be amused by what shows up in my logs as well, such as the following:

• I’m the most authoritative site in the world on “dumb birds”.

• People wanting to know about the history of the PDA are doubtlessly disappointed that my page on the matter describes my “PDA history”

• My collection of E-Mail forwards (under the humor page) is pretty popular.

• A very short review that I wrote about a Behringer microphone is consistently in the list of top ten reasons why people visit this site.

• A joke picture I posted, demonstrating the difference between where I’m from and a city in Florida that I’m not even going to mention here for fear of continuing to delude people, is still drawing people to this site needlessly, despite my having taken it down out of sympathy to the viewing public some two years ago.

• “simms code for money” was an interesting one. Do I get any of the money in exchange for the code??

• “what is a deef” — I’m sure this one was sufficiently answered. I’ve actually had several people write me about that. We should form a society of people nicknamed Deef.

• A Microsoft Publisher tip that I spent far too long tracking down seems to be useful for other people (if you try and mail merge more than ten records, Publisher sends each one as a separate job; Publisher does not send your print settings with each job, however, so your first ten records come out properly in black and white, double-sided, on green paper, followed by the next 190 records single-sided, in color, on white paper).

• “deef killer” — aah!

• “portable sound system” shows up fairly often. I’m glad — there seem to be very few sites that are useful on the matter. Mine needs updating, and maybe more notes.

• And, my personal favorite: “figaro figaro figaro figaro figaro” (second page of a quoted search). :-)

Password authentication is now disabled on my SSH servers — if you don’t have a key, you can have a script try passwords until it’s blue in the bits without having any hope of getting in. And I did this without once locking myself out. :-)

The number of dictionary attacks was increasing, and while there was little hope of them getting in by trying usernames and passwords ‘til the cows come home (did I mention that PermitRootLogin is set to “no”?), “little hope” is still less secure than “no hope,” and the cost to change it was minimal.

I just read a comment on the Drupal site saying that it makes no sense to use the blog module for single-person blogs, and that the story module should be used instead. That’s hardly intuitive…

He’s absolutely right, though, and it explains why I was so frustrated with the module that I created a new language in the program to rename all the “Steve’s Blog” links to “Random Thoughts” (after having originally modified the module itself to not include that link). Besides not being a fan of the word “blog”, I don’t need a link after every single entry linking to all my posts, since I’m the only person who posts on this site.

UPDATE node SET type = 'story' WHERE type = 'blog';

Fixed. No more links. Brian, this should make the “read more” links easier to see now, too. :-) I could turn off comments, which would make it even easier to see, but I’m still hoping to get occasional feedback (not that most of my posts really warrant any feedback).

I’ve mentioned elsewhere on this site that deefs.net is my playground for trying out new technologies. Well, here’s a new one! This site is now running on Drupal, giving me the option of evaluating it for use elsewhere.

Let me know if anything looks broken — I moved the entire site over today with a Perl script and a whole lot of copy-and-pasting, and may have missed things.

Since I now have friends with blogs that only support Atom feeds, I’ve taught my news collector a new trick, which took about a half-hour of research and four lines of code.

I’m thinking this will be a fun little script to mark up and put online here as a demonstration of how Perl can be used to make life easier. It isn’t complicated, terribly efficient, or following many of the “thou shalt write code this way” standards, but it does exactly what I want, and has taken a grand total of maybe 1.5 hours of development time since last April or May, while saving me far more time that would have been spent clicking and being subjected to advertising. I win. :-)

I’ve been wanting to do this for a while now. Given that I was able to get an RSS reader going fairly quickly, I thought I’d go for a simple blogging interface as well.

Perl, Mason, Markdown, and 12 minutes, and I’ve got something that I’m not about to sell on the mass market, but it’s enough to get me going. :-)

I’m starting to frequent an increasing number of sites looking for good articles to read, and most of them have RSS feeds. I haven’t been particularly happy with the RSS readers I’ve used to date, so I decided to write my own.

An hour and 70 lines of code later, my personal news page was online. I love Perl.