Today, I made some changes to our web server code and our privacy policy. The primary effect of these changes are that we no longer record the IP addresses of visitors to elehack.net. This change was prompted by our discovery of the search engine Duck Duck Go and particularly its privacy policy.

As you browse the web, a good deal of information is sent to web sites you view. I want to take this opportunity to provide a run-down of what some of this information is and how it can be used.

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Until tonight, our web site has been serving up XHTML content with the text/html MIME type. According to the XHTML spec, this is acceptable, but others strongly disagree. I find the arguments somewhat persuasive, particularly those related to the "HTML-compatible" XHTML profile not really being HTML-compatible.

So, tonight I finally crossed another task off my list and implemented the code to serve up appropriate content based on the HTTP Accept header sent by the browser. If the browser says it can accept application/xhtml+xml, then I send XHTML 1.0 Strict with the proper content type (even if the browser prefers HTML; this might be a mild HTTP violation, but I’m OK with that for now). If the browser does not claim to accept application/xhtml+xml, then it re-renders the page as HTML 4.01 and sends it as text/html. Since my server code passes data through the rendering pathway as XML trees, it was not too difficult to add a final post-processing step that converts an XML dom to an HTML dom using Nethtml and then rendering that to the browser.

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At long (way too long) last, I’ve gone back to OCaml and completed enough of the re-re-re-re-rewrite that we can blog again. Comments now work too :).

If you want the gritty details, check out the colophon.

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Last weekend, Jennifer and I both joined Twitter. For my part, a large use case for it is sharing links and random thoughts that aren’t substantial enough to warrant a full blog post. Previously, these would likely be shared via my Jabber status, instant messgaes, and/or e-mail. Twitter will provide a platform where I can share interesting things I come across in a broadcast fashion.

What is Twitter?

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The battle against spam is a never-ending arms race, and in the last week or two the spammers overcame my defenses. Thus, I have had to disable comments for the time being while I debug the current defense systems and potentially implement new ones.

I’m sorry for the inconvenience, but I really don’t want our comments filled with nasty links, and we currently don’t have a moderation system (it’s on the todo list, honest!).

After much time (too much, really), we have now deployed the new elehack.net. It now sports a spiffy Common Lisp application server powered by Hunchentoot and Steel Bank Comon Lisp, a Postgres database, and other yummy web goodness. Oh, and a new look too.

Enjoy :).

I’ve been working lately on a parser for Markdown to let me do some more manipulations of web content in our blog generation. It’s not going overly well. I went the other day to the Markdown source code to see how they parse, and much to my chagrin, they don’t. The canonical Markdown parser is implemented using a sequence of regular expression substitutions and hashing to protect things from subsequent substitutions.

This is not helpful. Not helpful at all. And it’s proving somewhat difficult to write a parser (granted, my brain hasn’t been working on it as hard as it could).

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I guess that this is a real blog now — I’ve implemented a commenting system. So now the world can tell me they love me. Or hate my guts. Or something like that.

RSS feeds are also enabled. LINK REL tags have been put in place, so Firefox picks up that there’s an associated RSS feed where appropriate. I still need to add manual RSS feed links on the right, but that’s a task for another day.

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Some of you will be pleased to know that I actually have a blog again now. And this time it should stay up for a while.

I don’t have a commenting engine yet, but that is forthcoming. One thing at a time. RSS and summary links also have yet to be added.