Continuing in the interest of providing multiple file formats for my web pages, I now have my home page available in XHTML5 format. URL’s just need .xhtml tacked on the end, except for the home page, which needs index.xhtml. This makes use of Symfony’s _format URL parameter.
Toby's Log page 92
Finding short TLD’s
I’ve been looking for a short domain to potentially use for permashortlinks. For a domain to be usefully short, it must have both a short TLD and short SLD. Having three characters each would make for seven total characters (including the period) for the domain. Much more than that and it starts to lose its usefulness. There are no one character TLD‘s (though they’d be great for permashortlinks). Two character TLD‘s are reserved for country codes. I’m a bit reluctant to use a code for a country I don’t live in, and the one I do disallows whois privacy. I’m a bit reluctant to decide that my address, phone number and email address will be “perma”nently available for all to see (assuming I keep the permanent promise of of permashortlinks). So three characters have been where I’ve been doing most of my looking.
There are a number of good lists of available TLD‘s. Indiewebcamp has a list of options with a brief blurb on their fitness and possible problems. It only has country code domains though. United Domains has a list with current TLD‘s and their prices plus soon to be available TLD‘s. It has a page for each with some information about the TLD and marketing-speak thoughts on uses. Name.com has a list with per-TLD pages as well that are often more brief. It’s hard to parse these lists to find just the short ones though.
I found two plain-text lists of TLD‘s (IANA’s and publicsuffix’s), which got me to thinking that I could parse these to find just the ones with three characters. I wrote a script in PHP and modified it to handle any number of characters. It looks like:
Continue reading post "Finding short TLD’s"Check request compression savings
Gzip compression is almost universally recommended as a basic step to improving site performance. It basically uses a little bit of extra processing on the server and client to significantly reduce the transfer size of most text responses. In Apache, this is done with mod_deflate (see the H5BP config for an example of how to set this up).
A while back, I was setting gzip up on my server, and wanted a simple way to verify that it was working and check how much transfer was saved. One simple way to verify it is working is with curl on the command line. If you run curl -I -H 'Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate' example.com and see the header Content-Encoding: gzip, compression is working. To test the transfer savings, I wrote a simple script using PHP’s curl library. It makes a request with and without the Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate header, and compares the transfer data info provided by curl_getinfo().
I feel as if my mind has grown more cloudy and gray as I’ve gotten older. When I was younger, I had ideas coming to me all the time. I was able to take in new things easily, understand things, connect things. I was more idealistic. The future seemed more open. Reality, the mundane operations of going to work, paying bills, cleaning, taxes, all the adult things have taken focus. Life has always been a tunnel, but now it seems a more narrowly defined tunnel. It seems hard to make any headway toward anything that seems like real progress.
A US patent that was granted, though later rejected: Method of swinging on a swing (US 6368227 B1)
Dreamhost now has PHP 7, so I’ve switched my main sites to it. Seem at least slightly faster.
Idea: Single character TLDs for permashortlinks
ICANN could make available single character TLD’s for URL shortening purposes, and make available on them SLD’s of one or more characters.
Continue reading post "Idea: Single character TLDs for permashortlinks"Raspberry Pi: playing with BerryBoot, RetroPie, and OpenElec
Played with my Raspberry Pi a bit more this weekend. I bought another micro-SD card and installed BerryBoot, a bootloader / OS installer sort of like Noobs, on it.
I installed RetroPie, a project that is built on top of Raspbian but with numerous emulators and a special interface that can be operated by a gamepad. It seems like it would be cool to condense all of my video game systems and even my oldest Mac (an SE) into a tiny box. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to do much with it since I have to figure out how to get games onto it. It doesn’t have a web browser or other normal Linux stuff accessible from its special interface.
I also installed OpenElec, a media center. It has a dedicated interface meant to be operated by a remote control, though since I don’t have one of those, it operates a bit slowly by mouse. It has various media applications that can be installed from its interface, basically one for each of any online services. I installed quite a few and watched some old commercials on GetTV.
I’m thinking maybe I’ll eventually get a second Raspberry Pi to use as a media / gaming center. It’s easy to dual boot them using BerryBoot. It would be cooler if I could figure out a way to more easily switch between them, rather than rebooting. opensource++
gah: frozen water pipe
Cool tool for choosing from various easings and getting their CSS transition cubic-bezier values (if applicable): easings.net.