Please test my new site...

cormullion · Post by **cormullion** » Thu Sep 27, 2007 8:28 pm

Hi folks. I've moved the newlisper blog over to another host, and taken the opportunity to switch to a newLISP system.

Since I'm not a big expert in developing this kind of thing (there's a first time for everything...!), I'd appreciate it if some of you could do a little testing to find any obvious bugs or loopholes. If you can spare a few moments, please point your browser to:

http://unbalanced-parentheses.nfshost.com/

and email me (or comment there or here) about any problems...

newdep · Post by **newdep** » Thu Sep 27, 2007 9:10 pm

aaa nfs host ;-) i think a good choice... they have newlisp cgi ....hehehe

The layout is quiet, quiet..how shall I say..quiet plain text, so its somewhat seeking
for a format in order while reading...

But you will finaly get it running in newlisp , im currious...;-)

m i c h a e l · Post by **m i c h a e l** » Fri Sep 28, 2007 5:29 am

Hi cormullion,

Congratulations on the new site! Very clean.

Wow! You even managed to preserve all the original formatting, too! Very impressive. You were brave to attempt this project ;-)

m i c h a e l

cormullion · Post by **cormullion** » Fri Sep 28, 2007 4:22 pm

m i c h a e l wrote: You were brave to attempt this project ;-)

Ah no - I didn't do the stunts myself - I used stuntmen (Lutz and Jeff)!

I'm not much of a designer - more of a minimalist traditionalist I suppose, preferring black text on white backgrounds. I might redo the banner though - after getting advice from the artist in the house.

If any of you are short of things to do and would like to see the source you can view the current state of affairs by typing index.cgi?reveal-your-secrets ... which will make the cgi expose itself in all it's shabby detail. I don't enough about security to be confident about whether this is a good idea or not, but it seemed slightly better than posting the file somewhere at this stage.

Best thing is - newLISP never got in the way, and always made things easier than they'd otherwise be!

newdep · Post by **newdep** » Fri Sep 28, 2007 4:36 pm

Uh? So your webside actualy should NOT be text only?
because I only see text and text, no layout nothing.. If thats correct then ok ;-)

Norman.

cormullion · Post by **cormullion** » Fri Sep 28, 2007 4:52 pm

Oooh - if you can't pick up the style sheet (styles.css) then you're right it's a bit too plain... :-) I've probably made a serious mistake somewhere!

m35 · Post by **m35** » Fri Sep 28, 2007 5:11 pm

cormullion wrote:Oooh - if you can't pick up the style sheet (styles.css) then you're right it's a bit too plain... :-) I've probably made a serious mistake somewhere!

I'm not getting the stylesheet to load either. Saved it locally to test some more. Don't know much about html/css, but when I changed this line

Code: Select all

<link type="text/css" href="styles.css" />

to this

Code: Select all

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="styles.css" />

it seems to load the stylesheet. The page looks nice :)

cormullion · Post by **cormullion** » Fri Sep 28, 2007 5:19 pm

Hey - thanks! I've uploaded your suggested change. It still works for me, perhaps it will work for others too.

You may not know much about css but you know more than me!

As my Dad used to say, in the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king... :-)

thanks again

newdep · Post by **newdep** » Fri Sep 28, 2007 7:23 pm

ahaaaaaaaaa yes now it looks more like a webpage ;-)

didi · Post by **didi** » Sun Sep 30, 2007 12:24 pm

Congratulations for your new site Cormullion!

Besides that it's based on newLISP , i like especially the design , it looks crystal clear - a real beauty :-)

What are the requirements for the host - how is it possible to run newLISP on the serverside ?

And will you publish the source of 'Lambda Press' ?

Jeff · Post by **Jeff** » Sun Sep 30, 2007 1:34 pm

Nearly Free Speech runs everything but php as a regular cgi. Your site and filesystem exists as an entry in a MySQL server which is loaded when it is accessed. It's kind of an odd take on how to run virtual sites, but it seems to work. Unfortunately, it means that if you have any large files as part of that filesystem, it is incredibly difficult to access them- they must first be extracted from the filesystem in your mysql entry.

Other than that, it's a pretty good host, and has a huge range of languages installed for cgi.

cormullion · Post by **cormullion** » Sun Sep 30, 2007 2:10 pm

Hi Didi! yes, the current version of the source code is freely available -- accessing information is in the fourth post down of this thread. (The source changes quite often at the moment, as I find things to fix.)

I had no idea about the stuff that Jeff said about MySQL - from a new user's perspective, you simply FTP your files to your login directory on the host computers and set the executable permissions and away you go. Performance appears to be extremely good - and there's not been enough demand for my pages to incur any cost at all so it's been free up to now! ;-)

They're running newLISP version 9.1.1 on BSD. I hope they'll upgrade to 9.2 before too long.

didi · Post by **didi** » Sun Sep 30, 2007 4:43 pm

OK Cormullion, the unlikely event happend and i looked at the source ( 0.1 alpha ) :-)
Compliment , quite a good chunk of programming !

So you convinced your provider to install newLISP ?

cormullion · Post by **cormullion** » Sun Sep 30, 2007 5:09 pm

:-) No convincing - the opposite. The first Google hit for "host cgi newlisp" was nfshost... ! ;-) I looked at their site and read their FAQs and they looked like cool dudes, so they sort of convinced me to try them... Of course, I have no financial or business reasons to consider, and no traffic either, so it's not a problem if they're rubbish. I've never done anything as technical as this before and I like tackling new things...

rickyboy · Post by **rickyboy** » Tue Oct 02, 2007 6:31 pm

Schweet blog! Congrats! --Rick

Fanda · Post by **Fanda** » Thu Oct 04, 2007 10:24 am

Really nice work!

It's a decent size accomplishment ;-)))

What do you think about adding something like a "top ten" or other version of the most read articles? This way they don't get lost over the time.

Fanda

cormullion · Post by **cormullion** » Thu Oct 04, 2007 12:10 pm

Hi Fanda - nice to see you again!

I think it's a good idea - the articles that have been read most often. Of course, 'read' isn't the same as 'appreciated', so I wonder if there's a better measure. The posts with the most comments is easy enough to do, of course.

BTW: did you get anywhere with your software development efforts?

Fanda · Post by **Fanda** » Thu Oct 04, 2007 2:47 pm

cormullion wrote:I think it's a good idea - the articles that have been read most often. Of course, 'read' isn't the same as 'appreciated', so I wonder if there's a better measure. The posts with the most comments is easy enough to do, of course.

Some websites use voting system 1 to 5 or something like that to let users say, how they like the article. Then you could do TIMES-READ * AVERAGE-VOTE as a sign of appreciation. It's just an idea... Don't make your system too complicated in the beginning.

cormullion wrote:BTW: did you get anywhere with your software development efforts?

I think you mean when I asked:
http://www.alh.net/newlisp/phpbb/viewtopic.php?p=9879

Hm... There is a piece of commercial software which I wrote years ago in Pascal for DOS (Borland Pascal). It is still actively used, so me or my brother has to do maintenance or add some features once in a while. Since it is mostly text file processing, scripting language with regexes would be a nice choice. Rewriting to C++/C# seems quite time consuming. Delphi is Pascal based, which would make transition easier, but it still is not high-level enough for my taste.
Higher level language would allow for more abstraction without breaking my head, resulting in adding more features easier, cleaner code and time saving.

Downside for newLISP is that it isn't known enough and has to be installed separately (users don't want any complication added to just using the software). My brother is a C# programmer, other friends programmers usually stay away from LISP, Prolog and similar languages. This implies that there aren't too many people, who could do the maintenance.

This project can wait, so I haven't made my final decision yet.

Currently, I am working more with pure math and physics and using newLISP for numerical calculations, visualization using Postscript and simple scripting tasks. (newLISP is a great calculator! ;-)

Fanda

tom · Post by **tom** » Thu Oct 11, 2007 9:38 pm

nice site, cormullion.

Show off. :-)

cormullion · Post by **cormullion** » Thu Oct 11, 2007 10:46 pm

thanks!

I am a modest person. You can tell from my diffident prose style... :)