Just WTF is up with Amazon.com this evening? I’m trying to place an order and I keep getting a “We’re Sorry!” message every other page load: An error occurred when we tried to process your request. Rest assured, we’re working to resolve the problem as soon as possible. If you were trying to make a… Continue reading WTF is up with Amazon?
Month: March 2004
American Gods
Didn’t post anything yesterday because I was wrapped up finishing American Gods, by Neil Gaiman. Amazing, fascinating book. Absolutely worth it.
And another Bend blogger
Add to that ever-so-slightly growing list of Bend (Oregon) webloggers: Brainside Out. Excellent.
Search Patch
While waiting to find out if my hosting provider will change the minimum fulltext word length for MySQL, here’s what I’ve done in the meantime to deal with viable three-character search terms. First, I split the search string into the component words (an array). I subtract any stopwords (I’ve got a big list) and for… Continue reading Search Patch
Searching and Minimum Word Length
Mike Boone, in the comments section of yesterday’s entry on searching (“Updated Search“), correctly points out that searching my site for a word that is less than four characters in length (like “php” or “cow”) does not work—no results are returned. Obviously, since I write about PHP on occasion, this is untenable. The problem is… Continue reading Searching and Minimum Word Length
Updated Search
I’ve been vastly updating the search functionality on my site. I’m still using MySQL‘s built-in FULLTEXT indexing to perform searches, but I’ve made the results page look a lot more (okay, almost exactly like) Google‘s. The main differences are that I’m not paginating search results (yet)—all searches limit to 10 results—and that I’m showing a… Continue reading Updated Search
St. Patrick’s Day
Just a quick note to wish everyone (Irish or not) a happy St. Patrick’s Day today. Enjoy some Guinness!
PHP Development Hint
Here’s a general hint for PHP development: A quick and easy way to check for syntax or compile errors without uploading the PHP script to the Web server and testing online through a browser is via the command line. It’s obvious, and I don’t know why I didn’t think of this sooner, but I’ve been… Continue reading PHP Development Hint
New (Old) Design
Just flipped the switch on the site design I wrote about (see “Everything Old is New Again“). So far things are looking good, but there might be some bugs still lurking. And right now the changes only apply to the blog pages; I haven’t reworked the ebooks page or others, yet. And there’s two new… Continue reading New (Old) Design
Button Sites
My post about the buttons from the other day (“Those small web buttons…“) yielded up some excellent links: Taylor McKnight has an amazing archive of all the known buttons, 2025 at current count. Nice. I’m not even bothering to “collect” any more. Kalsey Button Maker is an online app that automagically creates the buttons for… Continue reading Button Sites