Posts Tagged ‘WordPress’

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Appreciating Fonts

August 27th, 2010
Good ones are rare.

The look of this blog when viewed on a Windows machine has always subtly annoyed me. I’ve been using the default font setup for WordPress, which uses Lucida Grande first, and if that is not available it uses Verdana. Verdana to me looks, I don’t know, thin or stretched or something. Loose. Unfortunately most Windows boxes don’t come with Lucida Grande, so Verdana is what most people experience. Today I decided to do something about it.

It’s possible now to tell a broswer to load a font from the Web when displaying a particular page. I could quite easily put @font-face directives in my files, load copies of Lucida Grande onto the server, and I’d be done (except for Internet Explorer, and those people can get by with Verdana). Unfortunately, although technically pretty simple, that course of action would not be legal.

There’s a font on Windows called Lucida Sans Unicode (or something like that) which is very similar to Lucida, but is not nearly as good for italics and bold face. This will be my fall-back solution.

For a while today, however, I thought I might go look for a new font, something that caught the spirit of this blog, yet was easy to read on a screen and had a nice ink density. On top of that, it had to be free or at least reasonably priced, and it had to include good italic and bold versions, and it had to include the wacky Czech diacriticals for those few episodes where I use them, plus the full range of punctuation including a variety of dashes, copyright symbols, and stuff like that.

I came up empty. Making a good font is not at all simple, and the people who make the great ones quite understandably want to be paid for their work. If I found one that measured up to Lucida Grande in usefulness and that would give this site a unique feel, I might be tempted to pony up.

The closest thing I could find was a font called Liberation, which is a favorite in the Linux world. At this writing, those without Lucida Grande will see that font (unless you’re using Internet Explorer). It’s OK, but the text is actually a little smaller for the same font size. That certainly is annoying. I haven’t looked at the text on enough different screens to know for sure, but I think right now the lettering is too small.

How’s it looking for you, my windows-using readers? Do you have any favorite fonts? I think with screen resolutions improving, it’s even possible to consider a serifed font these days.

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Drupal and WordPress

April 21st, 2010

There is a lot of talk at Drupalcon about how they stack up against the competition. We are in the weeding-out phase of the Web Content Management System market, when most of the myriad contenders will fall by the wayside. Those who make a living building and using Drupal naturally want their platform to be among the survivors.

Drupal, according to their own assessment, powers about 1% of the Work Wide Web. The Drupalistas estimate that WordPress accounts for just north of 8%. There is another system called Joomla that is roughly even with Drupal. These three look to be the survivors in the Great-Web-site-in-a-box sweepstakes.

Honestly, I was a little surprised that Drupal considered WordPress to be a competitor. Sure, they both want to be used for more and more of the Web, but does Lego consider Tonka to be a competitor? Here’s the deal: Drupal says WordPress is the most popular Content Management System (CMS). I say WordPress is not a CMS at all.

That’s not to say WordPress isn’t a fine tool, in fact, this blog uses WordPress. But would I use WordPress for my current paying gig? No. Honestly I dread the day when WordPress becomes a big, fancy CMS like Drupal. That’s not what it’s for. There is a reason WordPress is the big dog, and it’s not because you can build sophisticated Web applications with it, it’s because you can install WordPress, find a nice skin, and get your stuff on the Web in an attractive and intuitive way. WordPress is a publishing platform, and a pretty good one at that.

Drupal, on the other hand, begins to shine at the next level up in terms of sophistication. It is the Lego to WordPress’ Tonka. There is considerably more design up front, and much critical functionality must be added as external modules that don’t come with the main (“core”) code. (Some of these things will be added to core in Drupal 7.) Maintenance of a Drupal site is more labor-intensive as well, as updating the parts is more complicated than with WordPress.

In exchange for the added complexity, you get a lot more flexibility. That’s not to say that WordPress can’t be used to make sophisticated Web sites, but generally speaking WordPress is optimized in putting a defined sort of information (like blog posts) on the screen in a very flexible way. There are hundreds of ways to add other pre-defined data types (for instance, there are shopping cart plugins), and all that works really well and most people are going to be happy with that.

Drupal is the tool you use when the data types in WordPress won’t do it for you. In Drupal you are building a Web application, where with WordPress you are using a Web application. Step one in building a site with Drupal is designing the data and the relationships between the various data types. Drupal allows you to design your data without having to design your database. Some of the ways Drupal implements your data design are pretty hokey, but it works. You can create pretty sophisticated data models without knowing a thing about how a database works – or even what kind of database you’re using. (In fact, you’re better off not knowing how the data is structured, because things can move unexpectedly as you tweak your design.) You are also presented with an almost dizzying set of options to decide who is allowed to see, edit, or create each little piece of each data type you define.

Once you get your content types defined, then you can move on to how to get actual content into the system (handled pretty much automatically), and how to present specific subsets of your data on the screen. To get at the data one often uses views, which are built using a tool that generates (frustratingly limited) database queries and then processes the results with a gratifying set of options tailored to each data type.

Then it comes time to put stuff on the screen. To control where things go and when, there are regions, blocks, panels, panes, pages, and so forth in a nonintuitive overlapping of roles. Blocks and regions and pages are built in, but the profusion of other options is a testament to the limited way they work together. For all the flexibility of Drupal, GUI building is still clumsy, though getting better (I’m told).

At last we come to the task of making the output pretty. For this purpose Drupal uses a maze of performance-sucking php template files that are invoked using a system of names that allows one to set up the display of information at just about any level of granularity. Many of these templates go hand-in-hand with specially-named preprocessor functions that allow you to customize how data is prepared for presentation.

Drupal separated the preparation of data and the presentation of data to allow people with different skill sets to do the different tasks. The template files can be done with only a minimal amount of php, while the preprocessors are where the real logic is implemented, unencumbered by HTML and CSS. This also has the effect of putting the risky code out of reach of those who aren’t expert in Web security. All good things.

I used the phrase “performance-sucking” above, and I meant it. The designers of Drupal made a conscious decision to emphasize good architecture and flexibility over fast execution. This was the same decision Google faced a few years back, as they developed ever-more-sophisticated pattern matching algorithms. While competitors kept things simple to reduce server load, the folks at Google decided that the cost of processing cycles and storage was tending toward free, and chose to emphasize the quality of the information they provided instead. Similarly, Drupal has decided to make things in a structurally sound way and spend the processor cycles and disk reads necessary to support that.

Drupal 7 will be even slower, but will be more scalable (they say). What that means is that although the software is not as fast as it could be, its behavior is predictable as demand increases, and it is easer to scale up your site as things go huge. Good structure pays greater and greater dividends as things get bigger.

All that stuff Drupal has makes it a more complicated to get up and running, and for a simple site (or even one of moderate complexity but with a relatively straightforward data model), WordPress is going to get you to the promised land with a lot less pain.

I am led to believe that the WordPress community feels it needs to compete with Drupal just as much as Drupal thinks they need to compete with WordPress. Toward this end WordPress 3.0 will have new features that answer some of Drupal’s flexibility advantages. All I can say is “PLEASE, WordPress, don’t try to be everything Drupal is.” That WordPress is not everything Drupal is constitutes its greatest advantage. Stay with your market, WordPress!

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New Features here at MR&HBI!

March 30th, 2010
Not only that, but you help decide how one of them works!

First, allow me to call your attention to the episode immediately before this one. You might notice the little icon is a camera. “huh,” you might be saying to yourself, “I don’t remember seeing that one before.” Very observant, Buckaroo! It’s for a new category, Photography, that I added. “But,” the even more observant amongst you might say, “There are already a handful of episodes in that category.” Right again, Wisenstein! I recategorized a couple episodes that were under The Great Adventure and found a couple in Idle Chit-Chat that were better filed under the new category. I expect there are plenty more; the trick is finding them.

The icon is actually my camera sitting on an opened unabridged dictionary. That may seem staged, but that’s actually where we keep the camera these days. Yes, we have an unabridged dictionary open on a stand at all times. No, that does not make us geeks.

Second, way down at the bottom of the sidebar, there’s a section called Other Muddled Stats (or something like that). That’s a wordpress widget I made that counts all the words in all the episodes, and keeps a tally of how many comments there have been as well. I plan to add other stats as well next time I have the hood open. Perhaps the number of times I’ve said “You don’t have to thank me,” or the number of times I’ve blamed the Chinese for things. (Hm… haven’t done that in a while…) Anything you’d like to know? The number of letters typed? Words in comments? Most prolific commenters? If it’s on these pages, I can count it.

The WordPress plugin itself is hand-crafted by yours truly. I started by downloading a different word-counting plugin, but it counted the words on every page load and didn’t have a sidebar widget. All it was was a database query and a loop. My version only counts when the relevant value changes – it only counts words when a new episode is posted, for instance. Once I tidy it up I’ll be adding it to the WordPress repository, so others can also gather useless stats about their blogs. It’s all about sharing the love.

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Haloscan comments to WordPress – the nitty gritty.

February 5th, 2010
... or, what I did last night.

As I mentioned in the previous episode, I recently had to move more than 8000 comments from my old comment system, Haloscan, and import them into WordPress. Haloscan served me well back in the day, but they are going away, and all my more recent comments are in the WordPress system anyway. Nice to have them all in one place.

The process turned out to be pretty easy. I found a script for importing comments from a different system, modified it, modified it some more, found a fundamental problem with it, fixed that, and in the end not much of code remained from the example, except the part where the WordPress logo is displayed on the screen. I assume that part came from the code the guy copied to make the code that I copied.

Along the way I learned a couple of things. PHP is a pretty flexible language, but running a loop that sets up 8500 data structures and runs 25500 database queries exposes PHP’s primary weakness: memory management. The whiz kids who invented PHP designed it for a load/compile/execute/exit-and-clean-up flow. Memory allocated during execution is cleaned up when the program is done running (usually when the Web page is delivered). When you try to do heavy lifting with PHP, you have to start paying attention to getting your memory back before the traditional clean-up time.

The code I started with did a direct database query to add the comment to the comments table, but that got things out of sync with other tables. (The posts table keeps track of the number of comments that apply to it, presumably for performance reasons.) I dug into the core WordPress code and found the method they call to post comments, and I made my code call that function. I have no idea what all the bookkeeping chores are that function does, and really I don’t care as long as they get done.

I didn’t worry about performance too much at first (after all, it only has to run once), but one of the database queries I did was really expensive (scanning all the posts for a specific set of characters). Even running on my local server it was slow, and I knew that if I tried something like that on my actual Web host alarms would go off and they’d shut me down for a while. I did a little optimization on that front, and it was enough.

The following script has some Muddle-specific code in it, but it might come in handy for others who need to move Haloscan comments to a new system. The part that parses Haloscan XML is pretty generic and would work for anyone, the part that saves the comments might be useful as a guide as well. The main difference others will have to deal with is where to get proper post_id based on the thread field in the XML. In my case I had a link in each blog episode back to the Haloscan thread.

The HTML bit in the middle of the file is not essential; but it puts a nice WordPress logo on the screen when the script starts up. I inherited that from the script I started with.

NOTE: While this script has code in it specific to me, I am available to customize it for others who need to move their code from Haloscan into another environment, or, for that matter, from any structured source into WordPress. Drop me a line!

<?php
 
if (!file_exists('../wp-config.php')) die("There doesn't seem to be a wp-config.php file. You must install WordPress before you import any comments.");
require('../wp-config.php');
 
function saveCommentToWP($comment, $dbRef, &$postThreads) {
    //echo "here's where the comment save happens <br/><br />";
    $thread = $comment['thread'];
    $postID = $postThreads[$thread];
    if (!isset($postThreads[$thread])) {
        $query = "SELECT * FROM wp_posts WHERE post_content LIKE '%".$thread."%' AND post_status='publish'";
        $postID = $dbRef->get_var($query, 0);
        $postThreads[$thread] = $postID ? $postID : 0;
        if ($postThreads[$thread] == 0)
            echo ("<br />Thread $thread has no post!");
        else
            echo "<br />Thread $thread";
        flush();       // got to have real-time updates!
    }
 
    if ($postID && $postID != 0) {
        $userId = $comment['email'] == 'vikingjs@mac.com' ? 1 : 0;
 
        //set up the data the way wp_insert_comment expects it.
        $wp_commentData = array();
        $wp_commentData['comment_post_ID'] = (int) $postID;
        $wp_commentData['user_id'] = (int) $userId;
        $wp_commentData['comment_parent'] = 0;
        $wp_commentData['comment_author_IP'] = $comment['ip'];
        $wp_commentData['comment_agent'] = 'Haloscan';
        $wp_commentData['comment_date'] = $comment['datetime'];
        $wp_commentData['comment_date_gmt'] = $comment['datetime'];
        $wp_commentData['comment_approved'] = '1';
        $wp_commentData['comment_content'] = $comment['text'];
        $wp_commentData['comment_author'] = $comment['name'];
        $wp_commentData['comment_author_email'] = $comment['email'];
        $wp_commentData = wp_filter_comment($wp_commentData);
 
        $comment_ID = wp_insert_comment($wp_commentData);
 
        //echo ("<strong>saved comment $comment_ID</strong>");
    }
 
    // try to reclaim some memory
    unset($wp_commentData);
    unset($comment);
}
 
header( 'Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8' );
?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<title>WordPress &rsaquo; Import Comments from RSS</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<style media="screen" type="text/css">
    body {
        font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif;
        margin-left: 20%;
        margin-right: 20%;
    }
    #logo {
        margin: 0;
        padding: 0;
        background-image: url(http://wordpress.org/images/logo.png);
        background-repeat: no-repeat;
        height: 60px;
        border-bottom: 4px solid #333;
    }
    #logo a {
        display: block;
        text-decoration: none;
        text-indent: -100em;
        height: 60px;
    }
    p {
        line-height: 140%;
    }
    </style>
</head><body> 
<h1 id="logo"><a href="http://wordpress.org/">WordPress</a></h1> 
 
<?php
 
// Bring in the data
$reader = new XMLReader();
if ($reader->open('export-8.xml')) {
    $postThreads = array();
    $thread = '';
    while ($reader->read()) {
        //echo "<br />read node type: ".$reader->nodeType.';     '.$reader->name.': '.$reader->value;
        if ($reader->nodeType == XMLReader::ELEMENT && $reader->name == 'thread') {
            $thread = $reader->getAttribute('id');
        }
        if ($thread) {
            if ($reader->nodeType == XMLReader::ELEMENT && $reader->name == 'comment') {
                // begin building comment
                $comment = array('thread' => $thread);
                $reader->read();
                while ( !($reader->nodeType == XMLReader::END_ELEMENT && $reader->name == 'comment') ) {
                    if ($reader->nodeType == XMLReader::ELEMENT) {
                        $property = $reader->name;
                        $reader->read(); // assumes text element following element tag has the data
                        $comment[$property] = $reader->value;
                    }
                    $reader->read();
                }
                saveCommentToWP($comment, $wpdb, $postThreads);
            }
        }
    }
    $reader->close();
}
 
?>
 
 
</body>
</html>

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In with the Old

February 5th, 2010

I got a message today that Haloscan is closing down. That is the service that provided refreshingly spam-free comments on my old blog. A year ago I finally abandoned iBlog for WordPress, and I’m glad I did. At the time, however, I didn’t want to tackle moving the old comments over into the new system. In my conversion I embedded a link into each of the old episodes to the legacy comment system, and left it at that.

It is fortunate I found out about Haloscan when I did. Another week and 8500 comments would have been lost forever. That’s a big part of the underlayer of this blog, the part people sink gradually into as they hang around more, and they realize that this isn’t just about me. There are some pretty interesting conversations, observations, poems, and even stories in those comments. With the timer running I set to work to get the comments out of Haloscan and into WordPress.

The move turned out to be pretty straightforward. (Simpler, perhaps, than it had been to put the links into the posts.) I’ll go into the technical details in an episode tomorrow, but for now, why don’t you pop into the archives for 2004 or so and find an old episode with good comments? Maybe you’ll find something interesting someone said once. Maybe you’ll see the name of someone you haven’t thought of in a while. Maybe you’ll see something you want to comment on, even.

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Why Mazda Should Pay Me To Go On Road Trips

October 23rd, 2009
A test episode with an ulterior motive.

Actually, this episode is here to allow me to play with different gallery plugins for WordPress. There are quite a few and so what happens when you click one of the thumbnails below may change dramatically at any moment.

For test photos I went back through my archives and grabbed a few with a common theme, which turned out to be pictures of the Miata during my epic road trip. Hey, Mazda? If you’re watching, I can sell the Miata lifestyle for you, this time with a redhead in the passenger seat. The open road. The byways of North America. People. Adventure. Wind. Freedom. Marketing gold, baby.

Progress Update: A couple of the lightbox options look pretty sweet, but there are none that I found with an option to fit the images to the user’s browser window. Strange. I looked at the source code for one of them and it even uses the size of the page in some calculations. Still, I like letting people see the full-size versions of the images without leaving and having to click the back button, so some type of lightbox plugin will likely remain.

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New Sidebar Feature – Tag Cloud (sort of)

September 4th, 2009

And it's pretty!

Most blog systems support tags these days. Put simply, tags are just words that can be used to create informal groups of posts. Tags aren’t as rigidly defined as categories, and so a ramble that covers many topics can have many tags. The purpose of the tags is to allow folks like you to find similar stuff. Since moving to WordPress I’ve started to pay more attention to tags, and at the bottom of each episode you can find a link or three to episodes with similar tags. It’s kind of cool, and it’s search-engine friendly.

Now I have added a widget to the sidebar that provides a ‘tag cloud’ — a list of the tags with the most-used tags in larger font. (I think this is a misuse of ‘cloud’, which in this context is also supposed to show relationships. A true cloud would group tags by how often they are used together.) There are much fancier tag cloud widgets out there, but I was starting to spend way too much time investigating the options. I settled on a nice, simple, colorful widget which is over there now. It’s called “ILW Colorful Tag Cloud” (or something like that). There are a few aesthetic tweaks I’d like to make, like condensing the text, but that shouldn’t be too much trouble.

The widgit’s all right, but the colors are arbitrarily set by me. It would be cool if the colors actually meant something. Since the number of times a tag is used is already represented in the font size, color could be used to show relationships or (better yet) indicate how many times a tag has been clicked. That way the tags more people found interesting would be highlighted.

Another minor problem with the tag cloud as it stands is that most of the 1200 episodes I created with my old blog system have no tags. I’ve gone back to retrofit tags on a few obvious ones, but overall most of this blog is untagged.

But no, not today. No widget modifications, and no more tag retrofitting. I’ve already spent far too much time on this silly feature.

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Programming Note

August 29th, 2009
New anti-spam measures in place

I’ve put in a new anti-spam layer in the comments. It’s supposed to nip spam in the bud before it even reaches the spam-catcher I already have in place. Almost no spam has been getting through to your eyes, but behind the scenes the comments have been building up, and this should simplify administration of the site. In addition the new spam layer helps prevent robots from scraping email addresses off the site and other antisocial behavior (not that I will depend on that stuff). The name of the Plugin is “Bad Behavior”, for those who might want to try it out.

The system uses a variety of techniques that are supposed to be completely invisible to you, but please let me know if you have any trouble leaving comments. My email address is addy

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Programming Note: Polls!

August 9th, 2009
Polls have returned to MR&HBI!

I was trying to decide how to spell a word I coined while talking about the preposterometer, and I decided to turn to you, the viewing audience, to get your thoughts on the matter. That required that I finally get polls working.

In fact, there are two polls going on right now, one about spelling and one about how the polls themselves should operate. The widget instructions indicated that I’d be able to show both at once, but the setting just doesn’t seem to be there. Instead, you get one or the other randomly.

While I had the hood up I made the sidebar headers stronger, to help people sort through the long list of stuff over there. It’s definitely more useful, but somehow it doesn’t seem right to me yet. Also, I set up so I can highlight parts of the sidebar with new stuff going on (the current color will not be my final choice, I think). Let me know what you think about any of the changes!

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Figuring out WordPress Roles

August 4th, 2009
With all the different permissions available, I'm surprised edit_comments isn't on the list.

A couple of regulars have wished out loud that they could edit their own comments. “No problem,” thought I, “I will create accounts so they can log in. Once the system knows who they are, I’m sure it will allow them to edit their own stuff.

Not so fast. Apparently the ability to edit one’s own comments is tied to the ability to create new posts as well. I’m writing this post as Jerry II, a new user on this blog with the exalted role of ‘Contributor’. It’s possible to mix and match exactly which capabilities a user has (with the help of a WordPress plugin), but the same capability, edit_post, is ties to editing one’s own comments and to writing new post content.

It’s not a total disaster; I can’t publish the episode I’m writing. It will go into a pile to await the approval of the administrator, so no unauthorized content will reach your tender retinas. It’s just extra complexity for other users who don’t want it.

Oh, well, they’re smart people. I’m sure they can overcome this.

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A New Grammar Low

July 13th, 2009
My pet peeve is taking a beating these days.

One of the common grammar errors that really sets my teeth to grinding is the use of “login”, “backup”, and the like as verbs. “Click to login” drives me nuts. I’ve mentioned it before, and my august sister pointed out the perfect argument to make my point: “You would never say ‘I loginned’, would you?” Today, this sentence reached me:

**EG-Delicious-Sync** backups the Delicious links into WordPress links database, and gives you many Delicious features.

I suspect that the writer of the above sentence was not a native English speaker, but has seen backup misused so often that he naturally treated it as a regular verb. This is how it begins. Backups, as the plural of backup, will get by the spelling checkers, but come on. I imagine that in another couple of decades we will indeed be reading and hearing about people who backupped their data. And I will be the crazy old curmudgeon grumbling in the corner.

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Idle Chit-ChatIdle Chit-Chat

Programming Note: Sweetness

July 10th, 2009

Experimenting with a new feature.

Sometimes I write an episode that I’m particularly pleased with, only to have it greeted by the sound of crickets chirping. It’s possible that while people enjoyed reading it, they didn’t have anything to add afterward, so there are no comments. That’s what I tell myself, anyway. Soon we’ll put that assertion to the test. The results may prove depressing, but I am experimenting with a feature that will allow readers to say “I liked that episode” without actually leaving a comment.

There are definitely some aesthetic issues to resolve, but there is now an option to vote on episodes you like. It’s not a big deal, just a way for you to say, “thanks, Jer, for sharing your genius with us on the topic of the proper way to belch after a meal.” Or whatever world-shaking topic I’ve chosen to tackle in a particular episode. Don’t be shy out there, if you like lots of episodes, feel free to shower me with kudos! Really!

After I get the episode-voting in, I intend to add a similar system for comments, so when someone leaves a particularly good comment the rest of the blogcomm can clap. If no one ever votes for any of my episodes, I will cry silent bitter tears and remove the feature.

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Quest for the Perfect Moon Widget

July 7th, 2009

If you want the job done right, find the right geek.

You may have noticed that as of this moment there are three different moon phase widgets over on the sidebar. None of them are perfect, alas (although the Japanese one is perfectly inscrutable). I looked around at other WordPress widgets and did not find one that gave out all the information I was interested in (especially for the eclipse) and was aesthetically pleasing. I thought I might spend a few hours and make my own.

The design was very simple. I would write a little Flash thingie that read XML data from a server and draw the moon with great precision and also look nice doing it. In addition I could put numerical readouts for more interesting (to me) numbers. Piece of cake.

I started my quest looking for a server with current moon info. The US Naval Observatory has all sorts of lunar data available, presumably calculated with far greater precision that I will ever need. The only problem is, they didn’t have data for right now. They had almanac generators and whatnot, but nothing that I could ping and get back a message that said, “at this moment, the moon is…” I couldn’t find anything at NASA, either. I broadened my search and found that nobody seems to be providing this service. “fine, then,” I thought. “I’ll make my own moon server. I’m sure there are plenty of places I can find algorithms for calculating this stuff.”

Only, that didn’t turn out to be so simple, either. The motion of the moon is incredibly complex. There exists a thing called ELP 2000-85 which is the latest attempt to make the math match what the moon actually does. What the thing does is loop through a set of calculations a bazillion times, each time with tweaked coefficients that make smaller and smaller corrections to the calculation. Compiling the tables of coefficients must have been a real pain in the butt. Refining the tables is still ongoing. The accuracy of your calculation comes down to how many times you loop through the coefficients before you decide that the computer power is better used for something else.

Nobody in their right mind would actually use all the tweaks in the ELP 2000 for anything as simple as a moon phase widget, or, for that matter, a moon landing. Along came a guy named Jean Meeus, who published a book full of handy formulas for calculating where things are going to be. He includes simplifications of the ELP 2000 (only looping through 64 iterations), and while they’re not as precise, they’re pretty damn good. I don’t have that book, either.

Time wasted so far: 3 hours. Completion of widget: 0%

But now my search began to bear fruit. I didn’t have Meeus’ formulas, but other people did, and had written software. I found some open-source code that implemented some of his stuff. Yay! I implemented the code, moving it from c to PHP so I could run it on my server. After a few routine hitches the code was up and running and telling me just where the moon was, relative to the Earth, accurate to a couple of arcseconds.

Time wasted so far: 6 hours. Completion of widget: 5%

Unfortunately, it didn’t tell me anything else. This particular code did not provide any information that required data about the sun — like, say, the phase of the moon. Harrumph. Back to the Internet I went. Fairly quickly I found some different code, this time in JavaScript, that also cited Meeus. It was much, much, simpler, ignoring many of the more difficult-to-calculate corrections, but I figured that the first code sample had already done most of that. It was simply a matter of adding the new code to what I already had. Naturally, despite having the same source reference, all the variable names were completely different.

After a great deal of forensics (that’s a big word for ‘wasted time’) I established which quantities I had accurate versions of and which I still needed to calculate. I got everything set up and ran some tests. The results were not good.

Time wasted so far: 12 hours. Completion of widget: 3%

I had expected some problems like this – perhaps in one body of code an angle was expressed in degrees and the other expected radians. Things like that. I started working through things. Only after another day of head-scratching did I test the code I’d based the second half of my project on. It was wrong. So there I was with Frankenstein’s monster of code sewn together from different sources, and one of the sources was broken before I even started. Sigh. Back to the drawing board.

Time wasted so far: 20 hours. Completion of widget: 2%

I should mention along in here somewhere that there are people who sell moon software for quite a bit of money. My little server could potentially put a dent in their sales by bringing accurate calculations to anyone who asks, but its not really the calculations they are selling, but the application around it. I’m not too worried for them.

Back to the Web and by now I was getting better searches because I knew the key terms to look for. I found two more code examples, both of which take precision to the most extreme available. One is a complete implementation of the ELP 2000-82b. This honey consists of 36 files with tables with hundreds of rows of numbers, and a sample program in Fortran that shows how to use them. For ridiculously accurate calculations, I couldn’t do much better. But… It only calculates the position of the moon, just like the first code I implemented. I’d still need to work out the phases and whatnot.

The other code I found is based on earlier math, but really concentrates on what an observer would see from a given point on the Earth. It includes corrections for the optical effects of the atmosphere and for the friggin’ speed of light. It’s got a lot of stuff I don’t need (other planets, for instance), but it has everything I’d be looking for. The thing is, the code is horrible. It’s in c, and the writer apparently never heard of parameters or returning values. Or structs, or anything else that might help organize the information. It is impossible to read a function and know what it does or where all the numbers it uses come from. It would be a big task to translate the pieces I need, mainly because it’s very difficult to tell which pieces I need. Still, it’s an option.

Time wasted so far: 24 hours. Completion of widget: 3%

And that’s where I stand. You know, maybe I’ll wait until I’m on a boat full of moon geeks. I bet one of them even knows a Web site that gives current moon data.

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Rumblings from the Secret LabsRumblings from the Secret Labs

Upgrading the Search Function

June 10th, 2009
But is it really an upgrade?

The other day I wondered how many times I’d used the phrase “You don’t have to thank me” in this blog. No problem, I thought, I’d just pop the phrase into the search feature over on the sidebar and let it tell me.

The only problem was, it didn’t give a very good answer. It also included partial matches, which would have been all right if it had either a) ranked the results, or b) shown a little excerpt of the resulting matches with the searched-upon words emphasized. The built-in WordPress search function does neither. Off I went to find alternatives.

One option was to hook up Google to do the search. That’s a pretty good option from a functional standpoint; nobody is as good at ranking results and showing you a bit to help you with your decision. The downside is that it’s pretty ugly. My (very) brief search made it appear that I wouldn’t be able to do much with the results. My search for Google-based solutions was brief because I found another WordPress plugin called “Better Search” which did in fact return ranked answers. Hooray!

Only, not so fast, Sparky. The plugin is still young, and doesn’t provide much in the way of customizing the look of the results, either. The good news was that the source code is right there and I thought it wouldn’t be too tough to rearrange things a bit to make it much easier to customize. The plugin author had already done the mysterious, magical steps to allow a template file to work, all that was left was giving the template the power. So I did that, and sharpened up some PHP skills while I was at it. Now if you do a search, you will see that the results include a relevance ranking. The result page is still pretty ugly, because I haven’t finished tweaking my new template for my site. (I tried to start with a general one that would be useful to others.)

Then, I typed “You don’t have to thank me” into the search box and got… No matches found. What? I know I’ve used that phrase before. I tried removing the word with the apostrophe, in case that had something to do with it. Nope. Eventually I got down to the word “thank”. No matches.

Here’s the thing: MySQL, the database I use, has built this fancy full-text matching thing (which I learned an awful lot about yesterday), but they’ve optimized it for huge sites. There is a list of common words they throw out to reduce the number of matches. Six of those words are “you”, “don’t”, “have”, “to”, “thank”, and “me”. Wow. To make things worse, I can’t change the list. Only the big boys who have their own servers can control the list. Those are the ones least likely to want to change the list, but there you go.

There were some other annoying “features” of the MySQL Full-Text search (exact phrase matching doesn’t work like you’d think, for instance), but some of those I suspect are the result of my provider using an older version of the database.

Now, I can put up with the limits of MySQL (this morning i was coding in my head the algorithm for showing an excerpt with emphasis), or shift focus and let the Goog or it’s new arch-rival bing do the heavy lifting – and the formatting. Why can’t this stuff just be easy?

Edited to Add: Well, that blog episode went obsolete in a hurry. I’m currently using a Google sidebar thingie that is visually acceptable (and adaptable). Play around with it!

There is a feature of the Better Search plugin I was using that I will miss – it kept track of recent searches and produced one-click links in a cloud that showed popularity. I guess it’s not a major loss, since not that many people search here, but I liked it.

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Idle Chit-ChatIdle Chit-Chat

Pardon the Dust

March 21st, 2009
We'll be getting things under control... eventually

Although this is now the official home of Muddled Ramblings and Half-baked ideas, there’s still a lot of construction work going on. Some parts aren’t finished yet, and others, well, they’re just a bit on the ugly side. Obviously I’m not going to win any design awards, but that doesn’t bother me much.

Don’t let the construction deter you, though! Look around, and let me know what you think!

Today: Modified the Site Meter widget to show the MOH and next big number.

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Posted in Idle Chit-Chat | 41 Comments »

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