Generate RSS from HTML

, 3 min read

As written in Generate RSS from Markdown extracting RSS from Markdown with frontmatter is simple. Now I took a slightly different approach and generate RSS from the HTML files directly. For this blog I still want an RSS feed. Simplified Saaze did not provide this functionality. Since 15-Aug-2022…

Statistics of this Blog in 2021

, 1 min read

End of May 2021 I moved my blog from WordPress to self hosted, see Moved Blog To eklausmeier.goip.de. Now after roughly half a year I regained ca. half of the visitors I had on WordPress. Contrary to some murky SEO advice Google does not honor "noindex". I have below HTML code in all my…

HashOver Comment System with Hiawatha

, 4 min read

1. Problem statement. When you have a blog you might want to engage with your readers by allowing them to comment on your posts. WordPress allows this out of the box. But when using a static site generator then having a commenting system is a bit more difficult. Many have resorted to Disqus. But…

Internet Adoption

, 1 min read

Internet adoption rates are phenomenal. I already mentioned in India is now the third largest Smartphone market in the world - Android Authority the massive growth in India. Above graphs are from Our World in Data: Technology Adoption written by Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser.

URL Count Statistics

, 2 min read

When I moved away from WordPress to Saaze, see Moved Blog To eklausmeier.goip.de, I first used StatCounter to count how many times my blog posts were visited. Later I added Matomo, or Google Analytics, or Yandex Metrika. It turned out that all these counting mechanism use quite large JavaScript…

Filtering Bots and Crawlers from Access.log

, 9 min read

1. Problem statement. When you run a web-server on your machine many bots and crawlers will visit. When analysing how many "real" visitors you have, you should therefore suppress these entries in your analysis from your log file of the web-server. This blog is served by Hiawatha…

AWStats and Hiawatha

, 3 min read

Hiawatha is a secure and reliable web-server. It is used for this blog. AWStats is a collection of Perl-scripts to analyze log-files from web-servers. By default, AWStats can read Apache log-files. It cannot directly read log-files from Hiawatha. The Hiawatha log-file format is: host, this is the…

Accelerating Page Load Times by Reducing Requests

, 1 min read

In trying to decrease load times of this blog, I noticed that the prism.js library requires quite a number of requests to the unpkg-server. So I tried to combine all these requests into only two. The results are quite impressive. I compared various measurements using tools.pingdom.com. Old…

Performance Comparison Saaze vs. Hugo vs. Zola

, 3 min read

Zola is a static site generator written in Rust. Hugo is a static site generator written in Go. Simplified Saaze, Saaze for short, is written in PHP. Task: Compare run times of Saaze vs. Hugo vs Zola. I didn't find a direct comparison so far. There is a comparison of Eleventy vs. Gatsby vs. Hugo…

Making Static Site Generator 500-Times Faster

, 2 min read

I already described some changes I made to the original Saaze software: Moved Blog To eklausmeier.goip.de Calling MD4C from PHP via FFI Considerations Regarding Simplifications of Saaze Profiling PHP Programs In Making Static Site Generator 30-Times Faster I already described that removing…

Simplified Saaze

, 33 min read

Introduction Installation Directory structure Basic usage 4.1 Static site generator 4.2 Dynamic content generation 4.3 Single file generation 4.4 Specifying an alternate build directory 4.5 Turning extract file generation on 4.6 Draft-mode 4.7 Parallel output 4.8 Stealth-mode 4.9…

Saving Attachments in Outlook via VBA

, 1 min read

Task at hand: You receive daily reports with attachments, which you need to analyze programmatically. Therefore you want those attachments in your filesystem. You need an Outlook macro, which saves all those attachments to a directory. Outlook VBA to the rescue. Below macro processes all e-mails…

Copy Directories to FTP-Server

, 1 min read

Sometimes you have to copy whole directories recursively to an FTP-server. Many FTP servers are not able to handle bulk uploads directly. Here lftp comes to the rescue. lftp allows to upload or download entire directories irrespective of the capabilities of the FTP server. Assume we want to upload…

Making Static Site Generator 30-Times Faster

, 3 min read

Static site generators take Markdown files as input and generate HTML files. This way, when the end-user visits a website, all pages are already generated, and the web-server serves just plain HTML. No database is needed, no server-side script language is required. Two main advantages are easy to…

Profiling PHP Programs

, 349 min read

Profiling a program is the process to measure how much CPU time a function uses, and also to count how many times this function was called. One very powerful profiler for PHP, XHProf, was initially developed by Facebook engineers. Facebook formerly used PHP very intensively. 1.…

PECL's Yaml Way Faster Than Symfony's Yaml

, 3 min read

PECL is the PHP Extension Community Library. These extensions are written in C. Symfony is a PHP web application framework written in PHP. Initially I just wanted to reduce the dependencies in Saaze, so I installed PECL PHP package yaml. When I compared run-times between the original,…

Comparing GnuCOBOL to IBM COBOL

, 4 min read

When I ran the n-queens problem in COBOL using GnuCOBOL I was a little bit surprised how slow the resulting program was -- it was slower than the equivalent PHP program. Therefore I installed the IBM COBOL for Linux compiler on the same machine and compared performance, see Installing IBM COBOL for…

Installing IBM COBOL for Linux on Arch Linux

, 4 min read

Task at hand: Install the 60-day trial of "IBM COBOL for Linux" on Arch Linux. Please see the updated installation description here: Installing IBM COBOL for Linux on Arch Linux #2. 1. Download. Downloading the compiler is at IBM COBOL for Linux on x86 60-day Trial or here. 2. Unpacking.…

Compiling GnuCOBOL

, 1 min read

When compiling GnuCOBOL from source this works without any hiccups. The usual configure, make sequence. I had written on this in Generating JSON with COBOL. But if you run make check you might encounter multiple check-failures when run after makepkg. The reason is that makepkg introduces a couple…

Parallel Mass-File Processing

, 1 min read

Task at hand: Process ca. 400,000 files. In our case each file needed to be converted from EBCDIC to ASCII. Obviously, you could do this sequentially. But having a multiprocessor machine you should make use of all processing power. The chosen approach is as follows: Generate a list of all files to…