Yesterday was Setsubun 節分 and so I took time out from working on the blog and made a sushi roll. Well, actually some friends made it for me and I just ate it. EHoMaki 恵方巻き is what they call the uncut sushi roll that you eat while facing the predetermined direction from which the god of the new year enters. You are supposed to pray for good luck and not speak until finishing the entire roll. EHoMaki literally means “lucky direction roll.” This year’s direction was NNW. I had a compass on hand to make sure I was facing the right way.
This rolled sushi was very delicious, but I still wonder what the one made of bread would taste like. Afterwards, I ate a bunch of soybeans. This is another Setsubun tradition where you have to eat the same number of beans as your age. They have no taste.
As for the blog, some of you may have noticed that the URLs are now more descriptive and not just index numbers. I’ve been meaning to do this for a while but was trying to figure out an easy way to rename 1000+ filenames without losing my ranking in search engines. In the end, I created new files for each entry and added a script which queried the database for the new URL and did a 301 redirect in the headers of all the old files. Movabletype already created an entry basename automatically in the database which I could use in the URL, but some of the basenames were cut off or made no sense so I had to check each one. I have a major headache from this tedious task. Also, I made a mistake in one of my SQL statements which ended up throwing a whole pile of errors, filling up the error log and crashing the server. You might have noticed that too. Anyway, all is fixed now and old links should to this site should still work. If you find anything broken please let me know.
btw, your photos don’t show up in the RSS readers anymore
is it on purpose?
Really? What RSS reader are you using? I’m using Google Reader and I don’t have any problems. I didn’t change anything in the feed xml so there should not be any problems.
Indeed photos don’t work in RSS anymore. Did you block hits to JPGs with no (or wrong) HTTP_REFERER?
http://blog.q-taro.com/archives/pics/2007/02/kokopyu-thumb.jpg
> and not speak until finishing the entire roll
Oops, I kept saying “oishii!!!” after every other bite. :/ :) I guess that voids the NNW. Well as long as it doesn’t bring me bad luck..!
Hmmm..OK it seems like more than a few people are not seeing the images. I’ll have to test this out on another RSS reader to see what the problem could be.
using Google Reader, I don’t see the images
you probably see them because you have them in your cache Roy…
Guys, I just downloaded a couple different readers and they all worked fine. Can you flush out your cache and try again. Or unsubscribe and re-subscribe to see it that fixes it?
Resubscribing didn’t fix it.
If you use IE, and all your readers are built on IE, and your photos are in your IE cache, then you will see them. :)
I just tried viewing one of your entries in IE, and then checking back in the reader and the photos were there. But for any entry I didn’t view in IE, photos come out as broken.
See, my reader (SharpReader) sends a weird referer with a 127.0.0.1 URL.
Referer: http://127.0.0.1:12108/sharpreader/page.html
And your site returns a redirect to a spacer.gif.
Location: http://www.q-taro.com/images/spacer.gif
So this must really be because of some anti-hotlink tactic in your .htaccess or something. The same is true for online readers which must give a referer with their own domain.
That’s very strange. I had hotlinking enabled on my server before I made any changes so I’m curious why this is happening now. Anyway, I disabled hotlinking for the time being. Please tell me if this fixes the problem.
Also, do you experience this with other sites that have hotlinking enabled?
Seems to work fine now!
There are some other feeds where I can’t see images, but I didn’t check whether it’s because hotlinking is prohibited or because the feed is simply malformed. Personally I don’t really care if I can’t see images in a feed. I usually click through to the site anyway if I’m interested by an entry.