Christian Heilmann

Author Archive

Search now with AutoComplete

Wednesday, September 20th, 2006

I just enhanced the site search here with an autocomplete option using the [link:http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/autocomplete/,YUI AutoComplete Widget]. Just type in anything and you’ll get a list of post titles to choose from. Selecting the title automatically gets you to the entry.

I had this dynamic first, using a PHP script to poll the database, but it seems the load is too much. Anyone interested in a step – by – step how to do it yourself?

Search AutoComplete in action

Give this blog a new home…

Friday, September 15th, 2006

Seeing that I spend too much time fixing and maintaining the server for this, I am now looking for someone who can offer me sponsored hosting for this blog. In return, there’ll be a big “thanks to X for hosting” on the blog and people will love you forever.

What I need is:

  • WordPress
  • Fast connection
  • FTP access
  • Spam protection (Askimet?)
  • MySQL
  • emails (optional)

In terms of traffic, in 2006 so far I had 358,003 page loads and 255,357 visitors (which doesn’t include the RSS feeds). Average seems to be about 8 GB / month.

Hope someone out there is happy to lend a helping hand…

No more URLs in comments, please

Monday, September 11th, 2006

Ok, I am sick and tired of getting ninety spam comments to one half-interesting comment on this blog. Therefore I turned off any link submitting in the comments and do not display the URL of the author automatically any longer.

I am sorry I had to do this – and I will display your URL when you commit a sensible comment, but I’d rather spend my time writing books than updating my spam filters every two days.

I only hope that each and every one of these lowlife spammers ends up in jail with a bunch of men pumped full of viagra who had penis operations that made them huge and have lots of stamina and energy due to whatever crappy drug that is sold over the pond at this time of year.

No more dead links – My first go at a WordPress Plugin

Saturday, September 9th, 2006

I’ve just played with an idea for a wordpress plugin. If you [link:http://www.wait-till-i.com/stuff/noMoreDeadLinks.zip,download this plugin] and install it you can use the following syntax for links in your posts:

[xlink:url,text,xfn data]

The plugin will then check if the url exists and create a link if it does or otherwise add a DEL element with a class called “brokenlink”. The xfn data is optional and there is no testing as of yet. In order to make them work you need to use the [link:http://microformats.org/wiki/xfn,valid XFN data] values.

Tests:

  • [link:http://icant.co.uk,My Articles,me] (http://icant.co.uk – me XFN)
  • [link:http://onlinetools.org,My scripts,me] (http://onlinetools.org – me XFN)
  • [link:http://www.allinthehead.com,Drew McLellan,friend met co-worker colleague] (http://allinthehead – friend met co-worker colleague XFN)
  • [link:http://www.offlinetools.org,Offlinetools.org] (should be broken)

My inspiration

The inspiration for this was Tom Croucher’s talk at barcamp London about the self healing web. [link:http://www.kid666.com/blog/?p=34,Read more about it on his blog].

[tags]SelfHealingWeb,Wordpress,Plugin,XFN[/tags]

dconstruct 2006 review

Saturday, September 9th, 2006

Yesterday I went to dconstruct in Brighton (thanks to Andy Budd who got me a last minute ticket) and all in all I can say it was a massive success (missing the last tube on the way home and having someone throw up next to me on the night bus was less of a success though). If you haven’t been to Brighton, go now, it is simply a beautiful quaint little town. Anyways, about dconstruct: (more…)