Finally I got to redesigning my web site. I was really unhappy with it: What I had the last few years was okay, with a hand-build Blogging System. But then I did an half-ass switch to Serendipity that I never completed, and when I was job-hunting in Germany I did another redesign to make the site look more professional (which didn’t really succeed). So finally, here is the new look. I hope you like it.
I found this really disturbing site on media manipulation while looking for a site to test my Trackback functionality.
So I checked the web and found out that yes, there is a problem, and no, there is no simple fix.
The problem is that Windows XP will add the host information to the server no matter what. Thus, the username is sent as host/username.
There are some hints that this could be fixed with the Apache mod_encoding module, but life is just too short!
Fortunately, I found a solution that seems to work! Basic authentication is pathetic – in fact, the username and password are encoded unencrypted in the URL in the form http://username:[email protected]/path. So I simply included the username and password this way and hey, it worked. A side effect is that this makes it super obvious how insecure basic authentication is (and that using https doesn’t make it any more secure).
.eu Domains are now up for grabs! So I thought I’d pick up jastram.eu – but it was already gone. Dammit! Oh well, saved some money.
I know that I’ll need such a study again one day. Here’s an article on selecting an open-source CMS and here the Slashdot discussion that has a number of good links, too.
For several years I’ve been running my own Blog software – but as I wanted to have more and more features, I realized that adding these features wasn’t justified any more, so I shopped around for other solutions. The winner is Serendipity.