i've added an image gallery to the site, and rearranged the top-level headings a bit. i'm using Yet Another PHP Image Gallery. i didn't need or want a lot of features, and this one looked pretty light. it installed and configured easily. it's a little buggy–i've made one or two minor tweaks–but being simple, the code is easy to follow. the template system is a breeze, too, although not everything is as customizable in the templates as it should be IMHO. i had to make some changes in the core code files to tweak the appearance.

i even used the localization system to change the wordings to the way i wanted them. the pseudo-locale i created is called "bh" for "bunnyhero" i made all those strings lowercase, and i changed the word "gallery" to "album," so as not to get confused with the old "gallery" page (which is now renamed "fun stuff", although the page is still called gallery.php…). hmmm i might rename the page and redirect from the old page name…

to be honest, i'm not sure how long i will stick with this software. it's a little fragile in some cases; for example, it doesn't handle magic_quotes_gpc correctly (having quote marks in a gallery description wreaks havoc, depending on your setting of magic_quotes_gpc). and there were recently a whole bunch of security issues with it, which took a while to get fixed.

on the other hand, maybe i will hack on it and maybe even contribute patches or code to the project. hmmm hmmm…

i fixed the pet code for myspace. it now uses <embed> tags, but i have to hide the 'swf' extension. it seems that myspace is trying to filter out all swf files. before, it just converted <embed>ed swfs to <iframe>s, which messed up any flashVar properties on the <embed>… hence, the magic iframe code i was using before. now myspace just strips the .swf extension off altogether, and <iframe>s seem to be completely disallowed. on the plus side, it leaves the properties (including flashVar) intact.

meanwhile, MOVs and MP3s in <embed> tags still work…

so i changed the myspace pet code to use <embed>, and changed the swf urls from like http://bunnyherolabs.com/adopt/somemovie.swf to http://bunnyherolabs.com/adopt/swf/somemovie… note the lack of any file extension. then i used apache's RedirectMatch directive in the .htaccess file to magically change requests for swf/movie to requests for movie.swf. the .htaccess entry looks something like this:

RedirectMatch swf/(.*)$ http://bunnyherolabs.com/adopt/$1.swf

phew!

…thus resulting in broken pets.

it seems they don't allow <iframe>s any more, even with SWF files. embeds are being filtered more than they were before now, too… i will report on this as soon as i figure it out.

*sigh*

i wrote a simple awk script to tally the different versions of safari that appear in my apache log files. i did this because awstats doesn't differentiate between different versions of safari. awstats does track different versions of netscape, but i get more safari users than netscape users…

read more for the script itself.
(more…)

i have disabled the bloglines blogroll in the sidebar because it was taking forever to load.

instead, i will probably export my bloglines subscriptions periodically and manually insert it into the sidebar.

in unrelated news, i should rework this custom theme so that the blog content comes first in the HTML. right now the sidebar comes first, which i don't like…

i have to remember to switch all of my old CVS projects over to subversion sometime, the sooner the better (i already have new projects in subversion, and i much prefer it to CVS). it'll have to be after i finish working on this major branch, though… *wrestles with CVS branching and merging*…