cmsharpe.com blog

Lunarpages says that someone hacked their DNS, which appears to have disrupted my site’s access to weather.gov, and the various weather services derived from it. During the investigation to see if anything else was affected, I noticed that my news page wasn’t working right. After some further investigation, I found that the format of CNN’s and Yahoo’s news RSS feeds had changed. So, I looked at my code, and found that it used old-style (PHP4) XML parsing (the expat parser, to be exact). Today, I rewrote that part of the code to use DOMDocument, after discovering that the simple XML reader in PHP doesn’t appear to handle these files. Now, CNN works, and BBC still works (it worked the old way, too). Unfortunately, it appears that Yahoo’s changes are incompatible with my format, so I have–at least temporarily–removed Yahoo! as a news choice.

…but here it is again. The drive home this morning was delayed by scraping ice off the car windows, and then by (necessarily) slow traffic. Why can’t we have more snow and less ice? Oh wait – I’m a meteorologist. I know why we can’t….

I had considered getting a CMS (Content Management System) for this site, but decided instead to simply overhaul the XHTML and remove language support. That should make it much easier for me to add/change/delete content as needed. And, to go with the newly fixed-up pages, there is a brand new logo:

This replaces the previous logo:

As I write this, the “overhaul” is a work in progress, and it may take a few days to get all the pages (excluding the blog and gallery) converted. The overall appearance of the site will not change much, but my ability to manage it should be greatly improved.

This post is just a test to see if I can post to the blog from an iPhone. If you’re seeing this, it worked!

As of this evening, there is now a page on this site that shows selected travel that I’ve done (obviously, this is intended for friends and family, and is unlikely to be of interest to anyone else).  For now, only the recent trip to Spain is shown, and (for now) the travel page and the associated data are still kind of “rough.”

Speaking of Spain, it was a wonderful trip.  Stu and I spent about a week and a half touring mainly the southeast part of Spain, especially Lorca, Cazorla, Salobreña, and Granada.  Since we flew into – and out of – Madrid, we also drove between Madrid and the southern part of the country. Photos are also available (and have been for several days) in the photo gallery.

Got this in e-mail:
http://www.lufthansa-usa.com/useugame2007/html/play.html. Played it three times today, and this is the result of the third try:

The game mainly tests your knowledge of European geography (cities). I do not live in (nor have I ever visited) Europe, but I do have a geography degree.

Well, my power finally came back on this evening. The ice storm last Sunday night/Monday morning took out electricity in my neighborhood at about 6 a.m. Power was restored at about 9 p.m. today, after about a 63-hour outage. If I remember correctly, the second-longest outage – in the nearly 15 years I’ve lived here – was about 8 or 9 hours, after a late-October severe thunderstorm mowed down about a mile’s worth of power poles about half a mile to the east. Of course, this website is hosted in California, so our ice storm had no effect on it. Apparently, the fires and mudslides in California haven’t affected it, either.

It’s been exactly a month (30 days) since I installed Akismet on this site in an effort to reduce the impact of comment spam. In that short time, Akismet has flagged nearly 1,300 spam comments! Only a couple have made it through to regular moderation (nearly all comments are moderated). Spammers:

Today, I upgraded the blog software to its latest version and activated the Akismet anti-spam plug-in. Of course, my preference would be the elimination of all spam, but this will have to do for now. Note to self: the Akismet display line goes in sidebar.php within the active theme, as the next-to-last line.

Today is the day!  It was 10 years ago today that the website that eventually became cmsharpe.com/Cheryl’s Spot on the Web was originally launched.  The site has come a long way since the original black-text-on-gray-background single page started it all.  Lots more is planned — if I ever have time to do it…!