Miscellaneous

  1. Does anyone know of any politically-themed Pakistani bloggers? I know of a number of personal ones and a few Islamic themed ones, but none blogging on current affairs and politics, domestic and international.
  2. For HTML gurus, what code do I need to put in my Blogger template (old blog here) so that the main page will automatically redirect to here? But the archive pages will still load my old blog.
  3. For MT gurus, is there any way to change the size of the text box for “Entry Body” in the “Create New Entry” screen in Movable Type? The text box in which I am typing this is too small for any decent-sized entries and scrolling all the time while typing is very distracting.
  4. How often does Google cache web pages? It has an old version of one of my web pages (not related to the weblog) and somehow hasn’t cached the newer version which has been up for a few months now.
  5. On a similar note, most google search results are still pointed to my old blog and this one is nowhere to be found.
  6. It is however prominent for some search terms. The most popular referrals I am getting are Eric Rudolph terrorist (I am #1) and “Sultana Freeman”.

UPDATE:

  1. Apart from Zachary Latif
  2. I know of the META tag in the header but that redirects the blog front page as well as archive pages. I want to redirect ONLY the front page.
  3. Pretty please.
  4. It seems that Google indexes pages about once a month but the Google caches of pages I am looking at (at school) are from April. Anything I can do to change that?

By Zack

Dad, gadget guy, bookworm, political animal, global nomad, cyclist, hiker, tennis player, photographer

15 comments

  3. for the redirect, you prolly need javascript.

    i think the self.location will give you the URL, evaluate it somehow, with a string function or javascript’s regexp abilities and just give a redirect only on the cases where it matches your front page….
    (redirect is like so i think, window.location = whateveryouwantredict)

    i haven’t tried it myself, but something like that should work, you can program, so i assume you can take it from there 😉 but if you want i might be able to do.

    for the textarea, email Future Pundit, he was emailing me about something like that 2 days ago.

  4. hi zack,
    answers,
    4. u need to use the tag, check this – http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=3000

    6. for google results, have u submitted the current url to google? u can do that via the google website, u might need to dig around a bit for the exact page. as people link to this blog, it’s gonna rise in the google results page.

    ‘bout google caching, try searching fer google dance on google.

  5. addendum,
    4. u neet to use the META tag, the link is as above, no need to use javascript or somesuch, a single line in ur head (no not your head ;)) will do the needful.

  6. Ubaid: Thanks, but I know of the meta tag. The reason it doesn’t work for me is because it’ll redirect archive pages as well while I don’t want to redirect archives, only the front page of my blogger blog.

    Razib: It’ll take me some time to dig up the Javascript, so if you can do it off the top of your head, I’ll appreciate your help. Thanks.

  7. The problem is that Blogger uses the template of the main page for the archive pages, so anything that’s on the main page will be on the archive pages as well. Unfortunately I don’t know enough javascript but razib seems to be on the right track.

    Re #3, you’ll need to hack your MT files. However, the text area should usually be large enough. If it’s not, this may be a sign that your MT stylesheet (the one in mt.zackvision.com not the one for your blog) is not being applied properly. Be sure that you have uploaded this stylesheet in the proper mode and that you did not accidentally overwrite it when upgrading. The tiny text area is the most common symptom of a stylesheet problem. If you’re unsure of what to do, go to MT support forums and do a search for small text areas. But I think that once you’ve got the stylesheet set up properly, your problems should go away.

    Another possibility is that you’re using an older browser that doesn’t interpret the stylesheet properly. I tried using Netscape 4 once at the school computer lab and my MT looked really terrible. If your stylesheet file seems to be OK, try loading MT in different browsers and see if that’s the source of the problem.

    Re Google, submitting your new URL should do the trick. When I set up a blog at niqabiparalegal.com Google amazingly found it and indexed it within a few days, probably because I had linked to it from veiled4allah.

    However, the cached pages are often out of date. I’m not sure what can be done about that.

    If you think you’re getting a lot of hits for Sultana Freeman, you should see what I’m getting! 😉

  8. A-M: My text boxes are not tiny. They are 66 characters by 10 lines. I would like to be able to see around 20 lines. I guess I can modify the stylesheet in the MT directory.

  9. Oh, OK. In that case, you’ll need to modify not the stylesheet but the MT template files. I don’t know why the stylesheet problem causes tiny text entry boxes, but this is the most common symptom reported at the support forums.

    I have not tried this myself, but I think the file you need to look at is:

    tmpl/cms/edit_entry.tmpl

    Be sure to make a backup copy first!

    If you can’t find what you’re looking for there then see if the MT stylesheet does set the size of the text area.

  10. uh, my blogspot template is messed up, but this should work (haven’t tested it)

    [begin code]

    var thisurl = self.location;
    if
    (
    (thisurl ==”http://zackandamber.blogspot.com”) ||
    (thisurl ==”http://www.zackandamber.blogspot.com”)
    )
    {
    window.location = “http://www.zackvision.com/blog/”;
    }

    [end code]

    this is just a simple thing i did in 15 seconds, but just add more “or” control conditions (the ||) for all the ways you can think of typing out the blog URL. you could do a whole lot of things to test the self.location URL or make a function that allows one to apply it easily to any website.
    please note that if anyone uses regexp it won’t work on old versions of javascript and of course this won’t work for those who turn javascript off….

  11. hey zack, your comment system is eating my script tags, just so you know, replace “end code” and all that with the script tag as in <\script> except change the slash to forward.

  12. ‘bout redirecting, al muhajabah is right, blogger uses the same template, here’s a solution, i’m not sure if it will work but you could try,
    first, remove the META tag from the head and republish all your archives. after you’ve done the republishing, change the template to add the meta tag and do not republish. when you do this, the changes will be applicable only to the main page and not to the archives.

  13. A-M: I realized that if I customize the “edit entry” page so that there is no “extended entry” box, then the main text box becomes 20 rows instead of 10. So better than before. I might modify that template file as well to make it 30 rows or so. Thanks.

    Ubaid: Thanks, that works.

    Razib: Thanks.

  14. Yeah, if you never use the extended entry field and getting rid of it helps, then doing so is a good idea. You can always bring it back if you need it.

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