What I Learned Today

I’m on a shuttle bus from Portland to Corvallis, OR. No, really, I’m on a bus right now. When I got on the bus, I noticed a plaque that reads: “Free wireless internet is available on the bus.” On the bus? And free, no less? I know wireless access is being provided these days on planes, at least for those long international flights. But bus-access is a new one on me. (And the airlines definitely don’t offer access for free.)

I couldn’t resist doing a speed test on this link (courtesy speedtest.net, which was the first hit on google and has an awfully slick interface). The result was 785 kbps down, 83 kbps up — not too shabby!

Recently, I received a pingback on one of my posts at this site. This inspired me to find out how trackbacks and pingbacks work. The main question was: how does a site know about posts that are made elsewhere that link back to a local post?

As usual, wikipedia came in handy, complete with a table comparing refbacks, trackbacks, and linkbacks. Here’s my summary:

A trackback occurs when server A notifies server B that A contains a reference to content on B. B can then publish a link back to A’s content (often with a small bit of context); this context-link is often referred to as the “trackback”. Since this activity involves communication between servers, it only works for blogging software that is trackback-enabled. Often the person writing weblog A must also use a special “trackback URL” (specified by B) when referring to the content on B — and not just in the content of their post, but in a separate “trackback” field (e.g., for WordPress).

Note that a trackback doesn’t actually require that A had a legitimate post that pointed to B. Anyone can send the web request to B suggesting a site to link back to. This seems to have quickly become another route for incoming spam on various weblogs, so a new form with additional verification has arisen.

A pingback is a trackback in which server B checks A for an actual link back to B’s content. Again, both A and B must actively support pingbacks for this to work. An advantage is that no special URLs are needed; when A links to B, there is an automatic notification to B (and B can confirm the legitimacy of A’s pingback).

Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? Well, the pingback I received was a bit perplexing. It wasn’t a pingback in the sense of someone writing a post about something I wrote. But it wasn’t (quite) spam, either. As far as I can tell, it linked to a kind of automated blog that links verbatim to posts on a variety of subjects (probably specified by keyword). I was unable to determine what the purpose of the site was. I’ve deleted the pingback. But it gets a small kudos anyway, for inspiring me to find out something new.

A word to the wise: WordPress (the software that manages all of the content you see herein) comes with a plugin (wp-cache) that’s activated by default. What this means is that the system does server-side caching of the site content, only giving you the latest version if you edit a post or if 3600 seconds (one hour!) elapse since the last time that page was refreshed. This probably works fine for individual posts, but it doesn’t work at all if you edit the theme/framework files… which aren’t tracked in the same way. (I spent a good deal of time this evening tweaking the site to add the sidebar content (at left) that shows the last few books I read, and I was mystified as to why my changes weren’t showing up.)

So here’s my solution:

Deactivate the caching while I’m editing, then turn it back on when I’m done. Because caching is good, since it helps the pages load faster for visitors like you, gentle reader. When it’s on, I have it set down to 5 minutes before the cache expires and it will reload the latest version. If you experience any problems with this, let me know in a comment.

Courtesy of lifehacker, today I learned how to reopen the last tab I closed in Firefox. Perfect for those overly zealous command-W moments! And how do you do it? Why, command-shift-T! Nicely cognitively adjacent to command-T, which opens a new (blank) tab. (Bonus: their article also mentions command-L, which moves focus to the address bar — I didn’t know that one either. Hurray, yet another click I don’t have to make any more!)

Today I learned how to set up a WordPress weblog. Turns out that it’s almost freakishly simple, at least when going through dreamhost: a one-click install and boom! you have a weblog. A second click lets you select a theme. What could be easier?

I may start playing around with the theme configuration. One of the items on my current “I want to learn” list is acquiring more experience with CSS and stylesheets.

Oh, right, I guess it’s typical for a “first post” to provide some information about the intention and the motivation for this composition. It’s simple. I don’t like to lose things. I particularly don’t like to lose knowledge or skills. So this weblog is hereby established to record tidbits I learn each day, that I may review and re-know them whenever I like. And for you, dear reader, there are two possible benefits: you may also learn something that you didn’t previously know — or, if I relate something that you’ve already encountered or acquired, you may revel in the warm blush of your superiority. Win/win!