Archive for March, 2009
I took a detour on the ride home today to add some big hills to start training for the Ride to Conquer Cancer. I wound up almost all the way down to the Bow River, at the Stoney Trail bridge, and climbed up almost to Crowchild Trail. The hill here is at the south entrance of Tuscany – it doesn’t look like much of a hill from here, but it’s a whopper. I’ll be trying to do this a few times a week, in addition to longer rides to build endurance.
I’m torn on whether to split the Links posts from the main feed. Is it too noisy? Do the Links posts drown out the “real” posts? Does that matter?
I’m really just pulling the daily links here to make a single place for me to search stuff – posts, links, etc… – so I suppose there’s no real reason to have the Links posts also going out on the main feed for the blog. Asides are already completely separate (don’t show on main page, don’t show in main feed, having a separate feed just for them) so it’d be pretty easy to set Link posts up to do the same.
Thoughts? Much babbling about nothing?
(the video may not show up in RSS feeds…)
a strong chinook arch blows from the west. hopefully this round of hot pacific air will finally melt the rest of the snow and ice around the city.
I’ve been running a copy of the excellent Feed2JS RSS feed embedder script on one of our servers for a few years(!) now. It’s a great way to embed any RSS feed onto any web page. The problem is that it’s a little too attractive to some of the more leecherly and unsavoury members of teh intarwebs. I occasionally take a peek at who’s using the script, and have found SEO tweakers, gambling sites, porn sites, warez, etc… all using it to aggregate their stuff together. That’s fine, but download your own copy rather than stuffing my server’s logs and cache directories with your crap.
So I just added a .htaccess file to the feed2js directory so that the php scripts are only visible if referred by a web page with “ucalgary” in the URL.
Basically, that says:
By default, block everyone. But, if the referrer for the request for any file in this directory contains “ucalgary” anywhere in the URL, case insensitively matched, then go ahead and let them in (actually, it says, if the url doesn’t contain ‘ucalgary’ – case insensitively matched – then fail).
It’s not bulletproof – they can still add “ucalgary” anywhere in the URL – could be the page filename, etc… but I figure if they’re willing to rename their crapware sites to “ucalgary” just to use the script, that’s just good marketing for us. Also, it’ll fail for valid https:// requests, but that’s easily fixed.
I had previously locked down access to the script only to browsers with UCalgary IP addresses – but then the scripts don’t work on valid sites if accessed off campus. Oops. But it worked 
This referrer blocking method should provide some flexibility.
To build a feed2js embed code, you’ll have to use this page to get started, but it’ll fail if you paste the code on a non-UCalgary server.
this cul de sac gets very little traffic, and even less direct sunlight, so the snow packs into thick ice that takes a long time to melt. I’ve given up riding on this stretch – my tires aren’t set up for this kind of ice.
the trapped pollution does make for a beautiful sunrise, though. not sure if it’s worth it.
relatively thick fog (for Calgary, anyway), turning into ice crystals that weren’t quite big enough to be snow.
the first cuppa the day. likely only one of many, many more to follow.