There are plenty of people pointing at my old RSS feed.

But the feed had been replaced with a script that was supposed to tell you that the feed was gone and to switch to the Atom feed. However, I also sent a 410 Gone header, and it looks like browsers and aggregators did not bother showing the content. I missed the semantic, and I think this blog dropped off the radar.

So, if you request the old /rss URL, you’ll get the 2.0 feed via a redirect.

Kurt Cagle wrote some demo code to show off the E4X JavaScript extension that will be part of the next Firefox release. E4X lets you treat an XML document as an object and access it through JavaScript’s “.” operator. It’s Simple XML for JavaScript. You can try it in the Deer Park Alpha build of Firefox.

When I tried opening that script in that folder, I got the page’s HTML contents without the PHP. What gives?

WebDAV guru Jim Whitehead explains: since WebDAV uses HTTP GET to fetch a file, the web server will dutifully execute the PHP as it sends it.

Arrgh! Self.isClueless == true.

Solutions:

• Don’t put PHP files in WebDAV shares.
• If you do, don’t edit them. PUT a new copy when you make changes.
• Using some sort of alias and set-handler-fu you could probably set up an alternate path to the share which doesn’t execute PHP.
• Scott Reynen adds: opening the file as .phps if you’ve enabled it in your Apache configuration.

Then set BBEdit to save the file as UTF-8 without BOM instead of complaining that it did what you asked it to.

I apologize if that last post sounded like I was complaining about BBEdit, it wasn’t ment that way.

What I was trying to was blog my bone-headed mistep, so that Google would index it, and someone else, trying to find out why they broke Apache, would plug that error log message into Google, find my entry and say: “aha, Apache doesn’t like the byte-order-mark,” and either remove it using emacs, or as my correspondent suggested, select the right encoding in the first place.

I try to be a good web citizen, and set BBEdit to create UTF-8 encoded files by default.

Last night I created an .htaccess file in BBEdit. Something I’d normally do in emacs.

I saved the file, tried loading a page, and got a server configuration error. The error log read /path/to/.htaccess: Invalid command '\xef\xbb\xbfRewriteEngine', perhaps mis-spelled or defined by a module not included in the server configuration.

I had forgotten that the file now has a byte-order-mark because I was using my default encoding. Apache barfs on it.

I fixed it by opening it in emacs and removing the byte order mark. I could had, as one reader suggested, just saved it with the right encoding.

 Write(6,1406)

 Write(6,1407)

 Write(6,1408)

...

1406  FORMAT('><img src=' 'http://www.fcc.gov/fcc-gifs/iconbar.gif' )

1407  FORMAT('height=20' 'width=525' 'alt=' '[icon bar]' 'vspace=5' )

1408  FORMAT('border=1' 'ismap></a></CENTER><P>' )

Why all the hubub? Subversion is version control software. Like CVS, you can go back across the changes you made to a file or a collection of files.

I’ve mentioned this before, but with Subversion, you can make a repository visible through WebDAV. That means you don’t have to give people privileged accounts on the machine with the repository.

But what I really want is an XML database that can look like a file system, and that I can query with XPath.

I am suitable chastened, and thank the Apache developers for mod_rewrite once again.

Why: because the more posts you have, the more work there is to update all the static files in reaction to a change (new post, edit post, trackback, comment.) More weblogs on the server, more events, more inefficient CGI processeses. I know of people reporting that it takes them several minutes to rebuild their sites.

I think this an unanticipated consequence of Moveable Type’s success: there are plenty of shared servers running Apache under virtual hosting with hundreds of instances of Moveable Type’s cgi-bin scripts running at any moment.

Moveable Type’s innovation over Blogger was to keep the idea of the static rendering of your weblog, but move the generation to your server so that a failure at blogger.com did not disrupt all the weblog writers on the network.

Generating pages, only when they change is a good idea, but this sort of caching can waste resources. Consider the case of a busy, comment-rich post. Posting a comment requires regenerating as many as four pages: the blog front page, the page with the post, the by-date archive page containing the post, and the page for each category to which the entry belongs.

Traffic to the comment thread, however, is most likely driven by other sites linking to the post, so a heavily commented post should focus caching on the post, not the other files.

You need finer levels of caching and invalidation in Moveable Type, and ways for multiple sites to share resources. My guess is that is what’s going on in Typepad.

They’re promoting the survey in response to some gloating by the Apache folks about their 63.98% share in the August 2003 Netcraft Survey.

Port80 looked at the response headers from the home pages of the top 1,000 companies. They found that 53.6% of them ran on some version of Microsoft’s Internet Information Server.

What Are We Counting?

So who is right: Netcraft or Port80? I’ll say neither of them are.

Port80′s correct when they point out that a large number of Apache sites are on shared servers and may be parked, or abandoned domain names. It’s an Apache feature that it’s so easy to use the Virtual Host directive to support hundreds of domains on one server. So the Netcraft survey is flawed in that they don’t distinguish between the importance of amazon.com v. whump.com. Both sites have equal weight in the survey.

However, the 53.6% IIS share of major corporate web sites does not correspond to dominance either. The Port80 survey looks at the parent corporation home site, which may not be the main destination site for that firm’s customers. Or it may be a corporation without a major internet presence that maintains a site for communication with shareholders and the press. So there’s the weighting problem again: cdw.com v. warnco.com. Both run IIS 6.0, but cdw.com is a heavy traffic commerce site and warnco.com redirects to irpage.com

Traffic and Weight

Looking at traffic gets us towards the goal of determining which server platform ‘dominates.’

Nielsen’s site has the top ten destinations by home and business users aggregated to parent company. Again, this is flawed data, as we lose the detail of what application/property people use.

Microsoft, TimeWarner (AOL Server), Yahoo, and Google (Google Web Server) are in the top ten.

Microsoft leads both the home and business use lists, probably by virtue of hotmail.com (IIS 5.0). But how much of that work is done on IIS and how much is still on FreeBSD?

Conclusion

Port80′s right to point out the flaw in interpreting the Netcraft Survey as indicating Apache’s absolute dominance. But they cannot conclude that IIS is the dominant server by looking at raw numbers of the top corporate home pages.

A rigorous analysis must take into account traffic going to every host and what’s running on each host. I’m sure that Nielsen would love to sell you that information if you have means to pay for it.

Aside

Everyone, when you send out numbers or pointers to white papers, please don’t use HTML email. That sets off my “it’s spam” assumption.

So, when the kids at Slashdot suggest drastic measures (oh look, Mac OS comes with this tool…) it’s hard not to, well, do your part for the Internet by stress testing the server selling patent medicines.

I think Jay, and the folks in Teresa’s comments section deserve the Hero of Blogistan with Anti-Spam Clusters for their work.

So, since Pat Robertson can get away with suggesting that someone ought to bomb the State Department, and Ann Coulter can giggle about Tim McVeigh killing editors with whom she disagrees, we Netizens ought to get away with suggesting that someone ought to garrote spammers and the DMA executive board. No, wait, rule 103.5343.a says: Only Conservatives can get away with encouraging the murder of their opponents. There is an exemption for Stalinists, but only in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Bloc. Well, you knew the game was rigged.