Tech notes

Tech notes is a blog I update with small things that I find during the day.

Posting in this channel is not my thoughts or ideas, just stuff I've found on the Internet.

Take it for what it is - a noteblog

Blogger.com down or unstable?

Lately I've had lots of problems with Blogger.com when posting articles. Searching the Internet I see lots of bloggers reporting the same problem. This seems to be the beginning of the end for Blogger. I belive that bloggers, with rest of the online community expects almost 24x7 service from providers and that instability like this will start the process of moving to other blog servers. Blogger.com have apologised to the community. Reading this blog you'll information about lots of problems.

Requirements for a personal CMS system

For the last few weeks I've been thinking a lot about my web presence on the Internet. At the moment I got dozens (ok, I cannot count) of sites that are not linked together. They are:

• www.helge.net - a Sharepoint site


• blog.helge.net - my blog, provided by blogger.com


• dagens.helge.net - my funnypage. Made in FrontPage


• ip.helge.net - a site for revealing your IP address

All sites have different layout and publishing engines. I also have som lab sites - but I guess they are OK to keep out of this list.

This document will try to point out my requirements for a CMS system based on my experience in the past with my existing systems.
All requirements does not have to be in place for me to choose a system, but this is what I'm looking for.

Cacheability. I want a CMS to provide the right HTTP headers to the client where content is not personalized. That is the Last-Modified and Cache-Control headers.
With these headers I can scale out a system with Squid if performance is needed. Also crawlers will work more efficient.
More information about these headers are to be found here.

Scalability. In the past I've seen lots of custom made web publishing tools that won't scale to more than a few concurrent users.
Given the right architecture a CMS should scale to lots of concurrent users without the need of external proxies.
I test a website using either OpenSTA or siege.

Readable URL's. My CMS should have nice, readable URL's like /fun/cat_mess instead of ?ID=333. This makes crawlers more happy and makes it easier for almost any log analysis tools to show you what pages have been visited. I use Google Analytics for statistics.

 

RSS/atom feed from articles. And with channel support so I can provide different channels (like dagens and GPS) for different users. One feed should give all channels, for use with Feedburner to enable quick indexing of new content. Feed file should be cacheable as described above.

 

Content editor. Other persons should be able to write content without the knowledge of HTML. This includes a WYSIWYG editor with basic formatting. People with HTML knowledge should be able to write as well. Layout of the site should be separated from the content.

 

Menus and navigation. The CMS must provide navigational means. I belive all do, so I won't elaborate about this point. But it is a requirement.

 

Mobile content. More and more users are using Windows Mobile or other handheld computers. There should be som abillity to display a scaled-down version of the site for these users.

 

Index and search. Indexing and searching is a requirement today. Either you can use Google Custom Search Engnine as your search engine or you need to provide this on your own. Google is slow at indexing new pages so it can take weeks after you added content before is searchable. (With RSS feed and Feedburner blog searches are updated much faster.)

 

Web community. The CMS should have a web community where support and new functionality can be found when needed. No need to reinvent the weel all the time :) Short learning curve for programming to the CMS is also required as I belive there is a need for customization.

 

Blog functionality. Not necessary but can be nice to have. Feedback on content is (almost) always appreciated.

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In the future I'll try to test variuous CMS against this requirements. And reviews will be posted here as well.

Web publishing tool

Are there any good publishing tools that are easy to use? I've been using FrontPage for some time now, but it is not the greatest tool out there.

 

FrontPage got templates. Nice feature. But it's very hard to update all pages made from a template. And I would like an easier interface to publish to (Like Adobe Contribute).

A day out with Fortinet

Today I've been to Stockholm and Vaxholm Fortress on a seminar with Fortinet. Fortinet is the number one in their segment of unified threat management. I took this as a daytrip, and this was a long daytrip. I just got home now (23:00) and left home at 05:00 this morning.

 

The day started out fine. We took RIB boats out to Vaxholm from Stockholm. It was a 33 feet RIB with 2x250Hk engines. The trip took one hour, with some unnecessary - but fun - driving. On our way back we took and old steam boat back to the city. At least they told us it was a steam boat. None of us belived so :)

 

In the sessions they talked about threats in the future and what Fortinet do to meet these theats. Pishing was given much focus.

They informed us about some new units on the seminar today. The units are described below.

Fortigate 50B - a unit with 3 or 4 switched ports and two other ports. No other details were given.

 

Fortigate 224B

A 24x10/100+2x10/100/1000+2xWAN port switch. This switch is supposed to do wirespeed IDS/IDP and can disconnect clients if they misbehave. This unit targets threats inside your LAN. Unfortunately the unit only checks for viruses as the other Fortigate units do. That is SMTP, POP3, IMAP, HTTP and FTP. NFS, filesharing and other similar traffic is not checked. This is Fortinet's first product for theath management on a LAN. I think much more exiting products will evolve from this.

 

FortiAnalyzer 100B

A new analyzer. Not much talk about this unit.

 

FortiMail 100

A new spam solution for the SMB marked. This unit is priced to about US$1500 I think. It can handle up to 57000 emails/hour.

 

In the end this was an interesting day.

ntfs.sys and blue screen

This weekend did not start out any good.

 

After hibernating my Windows XP laptop it did not want to wake up again. It went right into the infamous blue screen of death.

 

Windows did not boot and I found no way to force Windows into doing a chkdsk /f. Even when I booted the recovery console from my XP CD I got a blue screen.

 

I turned up nothing when searching Google for anything of use.

 

In the end, I had to go to the Linux community to get help. The Linux-NFTS project got a tool called ntfsfix that do something to the filesystem. From their documentation:

ntfsfix is a utility that fixes some common NTFS problems. ntfsfix is NOT a Linux version of chkdsk. It only repairs some fundamental NTFS inconsistencies, resets the NTFS journal file and schedules an NTFS consistency check for the first boot into Windows.

To run this tool on my laptop I found a GNU/Linux distro called Trinity Rescue Kit. This tool saved my day.

Have spammers found a new way of using Blogs? at The Blog Herald

Have spammers found a new way of using Blogs? at The Blog Herald: "Have spammers found a new way of using Blogs?"

I say the answer is yes

I am new to the blogging community, but when I look at the vast amount of information available there I start to think that this is the way to go to make ads. I see products showing up as blogs. Product catalogs as blog entries. I see (at least seems to be!) lots of targeted ads covered behind good reviews. Or is it just me he who is sceptic when I can't find anything negative about a known product or person? I can't say for sure but in the blog arena I get more spam than I get on my email.

Picture of the day

For what it's worth - I like this picture. It was taken one day during this summer when I had little to do.

 

First post

First post

 

Finally I got to get a first post. I had to make my own blog to do this.

 

At this time (middle of the night, local time) I really don't have much to contribute with. I only wish to thank my friend Zeus for helping me out.

I'll get back with some more later on.

Thanks for now,