Deirdre Saoirse Moen

Just for the record, the amount of time it takes from the time someone decides to to use a new pseudonym to:

1. Google the potential problems with the name, then register the variant that’s the most promising.
2. Wait for DNS to propagate.
3. Find a theme for a landing page site template.
4. Upload the bare bones to the writer’s server of choice.
5. Find the right stock art and fonts for the right look. Requires searching five different sites, but you think you nailed it for not just the one book, but the planned series.
6. Start setting up the email accounts. This needs another round of DNS propagation for reasons you never have figured out, and it’s two in the morning already.
7. Restart Apache. Whoops.
8. Web server down! No………..
9. Obligatory teeth gnashing step.
10. Oh, that’s why. Doh.
11. Web server running again. Phew.
12. Design the book cover from scratch. Fuss with it a few times.
13. Hack and saw the web site template into something resembling what you need right now.
14. Verify that the email accounts now work. Woohoo!
15. Hack and saw the background image that isn’t as perfect as you thought it was. What’s that jaggy edge? Ewww.
16. Write all the copy for the web page.
17. Have the author sign up for Twitter.
18. Have the author sign up for Smashwords.
19. Figure out how you broke the author’s web site’s layout. Twice.
20. Fix it, declare victory!

…eight hours have passed. And $35 or so ($15 for domain, $12 for landing page template, $8 for art).

Just in case you’re ever inspired to, you know, do the same.

I can has nap nao?

Originally published at deirdre.net. You can comment here or there.

So I had a phone call that was supposed to happen via Skype today. Only it didn’t. At the time, our household was under a DoS attack.

Inadvertent, in all likelihood.

However, after 192,482 request for pages in a 48-hour period, I’m gonna add you to iptables no matter what your intent was.

It turns out that the culprit is that a handful of pages kept making the URL longer and longer. For reasons that I have not yet figured out (and probably won’t sleep until I do), apache did its best to serve up the pages even though those directories don’t exist.

So I have log files for things like (the URL is fake, but the patterns in the post are real):

http://foo.com/woof/a/a/a/a/b/a/a/b/b/b/b/b/cat.html

I found one of the offending pages:

http://foo.com/woof/a/b/cat.html

I can click a link on that page, and it’ll go to:

http://foo.com/woof/a/b/b/kitty.html

…and click a link that looks the same, and it’ll go to:

http://foo.com/woof/a/b/b/b/kitty.html

…then…

http://foo.com/woof/a/b/b/b/b/kitty.html

http://foo.com/woof/a/b/b/b/b/b/kitty.html

http://foo.com/woof/a/b/b/b/b/b/b/kitty.html

http://foo.com/woof/a/b/b/b/b/b/b/b/kitty.html

Except that directory structure’s not on disk. There’s no symlinks up or down the directory tree (do not do that!) that would cause this structure.

It’s html (old hmtl), no PHP, no server-side includes, no JavaScript (or CSS), no .htaccess, no rewrite rules. We’re talking stuff that’s pushing 15-20 years old, here.

It should work.

Yet, obviously, there’s a problem.

So, when someone tries to recursively wget the site’s document tree and uses a high enough number of levels (at least 13 in this case), suddenly 192,482 files get delivered and the requests will never terminate because some pages go (apparently) infinitely deep.

FWIW, we turned symlinks off anyway, and that didn’t prevent it from happening. It’s completely not obvious to me what the source of the issue actually is.

Hell, I was beginning to suspect mod_speling and that’s not even enabled.

Update: An Hour Later….

It turns out that it was an Apache directive I’ve seen so often in examples that I’d overlooked it, even though I never enable it myself.

MultiViews.

Specifically, in directory a, there was no directory b, but there was a b.html. So it would serve that instead, and the apparent directory would get longer and longer and longer, leading wget to think there was another directory level to fetch.

So all that was needed was to turn off MultiViews and restart apache. None of us could remember exactly when that changed, but I think t thhere was a server rebuild in there somewhen.

Also, to the person who’s requested 60,000 copies of the same file that’s so old Rick doesn’t even remember what it is? Dude.

Originally published at deirdre.net. You can comment here or there.

Fellow Apple and Safari alum Vicki Murley has written a book about CSS transforms. You can purchase the book here.

When it comes to books, I’m generally reading fiction in portrait mode, and am of the “just give me the damn text” persuasion. A lot of the extra touches that iBooks Author offers don’t add anything for that kind of book.

However, Vicki’s is the perfect book to showcase the additional features of iBooks Author with its interactive code examples.

Originally published at deirdre.net. You can comment here or there.

Back when the web was born, links were underlined. Many early browsers (e.g., lynx) were text only, and many people didn’t have color monitors, or had monitors that were severely limited in palettes (like 16 colors), so the convention of underlines stayed.

However, an underlined link isn’t as legible as one that isn’t underlined.

For those of you who want some thoughts about alternatives, here’s a few:

1) Make the color different than surrounding un-linked text, and add a change of color when the text is hovered over or active. E.g.:

a {text-decoration: none}
a:link {color: #ff9900}
a:active, a:hover {color: #ff0000} /* change from orange to red */

2) add a more delicate border when hovered over, e.g.:

a {text-decoration: none}
a:link {color: #ff9900}
a:active, a:hover {border: bottom: thin dotted #ff9900} /* add border when hovering */

3) add some fancy schmancy effect when hovering. Right now, on deirdre.net, I change the text color and add a text-shadow effect:

a{color:#00437f; text-decoration:none}
a:hover{color: #002444; text-decoration:none; border-bottom: none; text-shadow: #00598d 0 0 4px}

Just be clear and give sufficient contrast that people understand a) it’s a link, and b) when the link is hovered over or active.

You can see a live example here.

Originally published at deirdre.net. You can comment here or there.