Idle Words

Looking for SF Lodging

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 00:00:00 -0200

I'm looking for a sublet or short-term rental in San Francisco from January 10 to about February 15. If anyone knows a place that's available for that time period, please let me know at maciej@ceglowski.com. My only requirement is a place where I can hermit it up a notch - that is to say, no shared flats.

Relative proximity to Dolores Park would be nice, but is not essential. I'm happy to pay money, take care of various animals, and so on.

Of course, I'll use the hermit time to actually finish some long-overdue essays for this site.

Using WordPress to generate flat files

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0200

Some readers have emailed asking me for more specifics about how to run WordPress offline, like I suggested in my last post. So I spent a couple of hours struggling with it last night to get a sense of what it would take.

This is an almost useless and jargon-packed summary, but my hope is that some intrepid WP user may try following these steps and use them as a starting point for a proper HOWTO.

If you want comments, you'll need to switch from whatever is built in to WordPress to an outside JavaScript-based service like disqus. Disqus can import your existing comments when you set it up. Disclaimer: I have never used this service and know nothing about it - there may be better alternatives.

Set up WordPress on the machine where you want to do your writing and editing. The WP site has copious instructions for all kinds of installation scenarios.

Configure WP to use 'fancy' permalinks - not the default, which uses query string parameters. Basically, if there's a question mark in the URL, you can't mirror the site. If you're on OS X, you will now have to struggle with mod_rewrite and .htaccess permissions for a while.

Configure WP to allow robots access (otherwise wget will not work in the next step).

Use wget to crawl your new blog and turn it into a bunch of static files:
wget --mirror -p --html-extension --convert-links http://your.local.url/
What this does is explained in detail here. I've left off some unnecessary flags.

Set up apache on your blog server to serve static content from wherever you want your blog files to live.

Now copy over the static files you created with wget to their new home on the remote machine using a secure transfer method like rsync or sftp.

Laugh in the face of mankind / email me about why this didn't work.

Good luck, and please let me know if you are able to follow these steps and produce a more helpful HOWTO that I can link to.

How To Not Get Your Blog Hacked

Sun, 06 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0200

I am going to break with seven years of precedent and indulge in a little bit of blog software wank.

Recently an exploit has surfaced in WordPress, a popular kind of blog software. If you run WordPress on a public server, an attacker can get full access to your site and do nasty things, up to and including deleting all your data. If you listen to the WordPress people, the answer to this is 'be extremely zealous about updating your software', which is the same as saying, devote half your life to learning and understanding WordPress administration.

If you listen to me, the answer is much simpler. Do not run this kind of software on a public server. Either host your blog with a competent centralized site (like LiveJournal or Blogger) that takes the burden of upgrading, backing up and patching off your hands, or use whatever personal publishing software you like (WordPress, Movable Type, and so on), but keep it on a local machine.

You can use a program like wget or curl to generate a flat HTML version of your website from this local version, and then upload these files to your public server to share them with the world. Now there is no way you can get hacked, because your server is just serving static files. As a bonus, you don't have to worry about your site ever going down because of database problems or excessive load. And as another bonus, you now have a remote backup of your blog.

If you want comments or other fanciness (why??), you might need a little more complicated setup than this. But the basic idea of keeping your administrative interface off the internet will save you endless angst as these exploits keep coming. WordPress has an especially terrible track record with security, but all these programs are just accidents waiting to happen.

If you have a blog setup that you think is insecure but don't know how to begin fixing it, feel free to email me and I will do my best to point you at an answer.

The O-Zone Romanian Proficiency Exam

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0200

Because of the internet, the first Romanian words I ever learned were about love and linden trees. Now that I've been living in the country for a while, I thought I would check to see how many other Numa Numan secrets were within my understanding:

Alo? Salut! Sunt eu, un haiduc
și te rog iubirea mea primește, fericirea.
Alo? Alo! Sunt eu, Picasso.
Ți-am dat beep și sunt voinic
dar să știi nu-ți cer nimic.

Vrei să pleci dar nu mă, nu mă iei,
Nu mă, nu mă iei,
Nu mă, nu mă, nu mă iei,
Chipul tău și dragostea din tei
mi-amintesc de ochii tăi.

Te sun sa-ți spun ce simt acum.
Alo, iubirea mea. Sunt eu, fericirea.
Alo? Alo! Sunt iarași eu, Picasso.
Ți-am dat beep și sunt voinic
dar să știi nu-ți cer nimic.

Nu foarte bine...

Localizing Pinboard

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0200

Thanks to all the people who volunteered to alpha test Pinboard, my new bookmarking site. The site is now open for beta testing (which means bookmarks are backed up and features are less likely to break). Give it a try if you find delicious too slow for your needs.

I want to issue one more call for volunteers, this time to help localize the service for non-anglophone users. If you're a native speaker of French, Polish*, Spanish or Russian and would like to help, please email me and I will send you a list of text that needs translating.

* I am a native speaker of Polish, but it turns out I have no idea how to say "bookmark" or "cached" or anything else that wasn't in common use in 1981. Pomóżcie!