(June 12, 2011)

Site finally repaired!

After months of head-scratching, this site is finally back to work. It was bizarre: one day it worked; the next day it didn't, and I was loathe to muck about with code which had been working for years. Apart from that, life got in the way, and I was busy with other things. But gradually, after much more reading and debugging, I was able to resolve a race condition with the way the scripts were called in jquery. All that was needed was to change the order of the scripts. I probably changed the order before, thinking that the order wasn't important, and the order ended up crippling my site.

In other news, this site is mirrored at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where I am currently working on other things FAQ-related at the moment.

(March 21, 2009)

Ajax is finally here

This is a long time coming. I finally was able to implement Ajax, resulting in a CONSIDERABLE economy in space, with almost the same info. Help for building this site came from a variety of web and book sources, but finally the vision is realised, and web 2.0 has come to foodsci.info! If you're keeping a scorecard, I am using css, javascript and ajax together. The calculator and other goodies will be added as time allows.

(March 31, 2007)

Some More Changes

As for some further changes, I have moved nearly all computer-related content to linux.alimentarus.net, in order that the web sites are more thematically based. I have yet to move the Internet-related stuff there.

(February 18, 2007)

Added DHTML/Javascript menus

This time, there is no more transparncy problem. Real dropdown menus have been implemented, but for this to work, this might spell the end of my use of frames. And I may need to find something to use other than the food graphic, which I have had my doubts about, anyway. The dropdown menus and SWF files don't seem to get along, which is why the menu is currently in a sidebar. There is also an introduction added to the top of the website page. Also, the swim schedule is updated, and nearly 400 new fortunes have been added to my fortune cookie database. In the menu, there is a link to fortunes under the "Tools" heading, in case you have too much time on your hands.

(June 28, 2006)

Main pages in green

I was intending to change the color of the web pages at some point, and decided to do it today. What used to be a major editing effort over several web pages now is done in seconds on a single CSS file. There is a problem, though ... I now find that the transparencies are not properly rendered under Firefox, as shown by the buttons on the sidebar.

(April 2, 2006)

Hits to website shooting up exponentially

Up until December of last year, the website averaged around 100-200 hits per day. In recent months (after December), it seems that there has been an exponential growth in the hit count, since just in the past month (March 2006), the daily hit rate has averaged 755. That works out to 23421 hits for the month of March, up over 300% from December (7166 hits). This past month saw a record 657 megabytes of internet traffic. The peak times appear to be around noon, 4PM, and 10PM-1AM. The main page gets the most hits. In March, another 525 hits were added to the counter so that now the main page is topping 5000 hits since the site opened.

For whatever reason the "list of lists" is among the top things being accessed (in terms of sheer kilobytes, it accounts for 18% of the byte traffic -- a sheer 117 megabytes of the total 657 MB this month). That file is an old list of mailing lists which have not been updated since the middle-1990s; there mostly for internet lore. However, byte for byte, that is not the most downloaded file. The file of Internet Jargon, weighing in at 1.16 MB, accounted for 21% of the traffic, or 139 MB. The Big Dummy's Guide is a distant third. But together, these three files alone have accounted for over 50% of the total traffic this month. Keep in mind that these files have never seen an update in over 10 years, on average.

Above is a chart of hits versus traffic. I thought I would create a spreadsheet which would aid in the regression to some predictive model of a trend. What I have found is that more hits doesn't necessarily mean more kilobytes of traffic. When the hit count gets high, the byte count doesn't necessarily rise along with it. It could depend on what people are looking at. It could also mean that script kiddies are accessing the site resulting in page hits, but nothing downloaded. It could mean that someone somewhere told his pupils in Internet Class to perform wget on my entire website (few hits, several megs). The greatest amount of 1-day byte traffic was 45 megs (see above graph) achieved on a day when the number hits were below 1000. As you go above 1000 hits, predicting what the traffic will be will become a problem. The second heaviest day for net traffic was on a day I had only around 100 hits, but over 36 megs downloaded. Then there is a time I had over 1000 hits on a light day where less than 5 megs were downloaded.

My spreadsheet tells me that for R² to be greatest (best correlation), this graph has to be a sixth-order polynomial. That way, I get a correlation of about 0.65. Not great, but suggestive that things are going up.

It is rather refreshing that the number of kB downloaded per hit has remained fairly constant with time. It means that by and large the hits have not been more frivolous in one period than in any other. Every week has had its proportion of regular visitors, web bots, and misdirected people; and the "kb per hit" line shows that this doesn't change over time, even as the number of hits and total bytes downloaded are on the increase.

On April 1, I have had the highest hit count/download count on record: about 65 megabytes and 1400 downloads. I am glad to see the net traffic rise so high, and I hope the trend continues.

(August 7, 2005)

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) finally Implemented

Another source of web site torture was to implement cascading style sheets. I have to admit to being somewhat a stick in the mud with these things, but it is not just because I am a computer geek that likes to edit using vi, and still think that a 486 computer is fast enough for any consumer out there. I avoided it because it was waaaaaaay too much work.

I had over 87 HTML files that I had to edit by hand for CSS to have any kind of meaningful impact. The whole point of using CSS is to give the whole web site a kind of "unified", thematic look in a way that makes it easy to change around without having to change all 87 files every time I feel like using some other color, font, or whatnot. The only things are:

1. All 87 files had to know about the CSS file I used. That meant that it had to be inserted into each header.
2. The old, repetitive code had to be ripped out of all 87 files so that the CSS is not over-ridden. That included over 90% of the font tags, and nearly every entry in every table.
3. It became clear that some pages needed a complete overhaul, most notably the "list of interesting links" section, which is at least 5 years old, and nearly every link was dead (the AltaVista link was still linked to Digital Corporation's site). This was actually my favourite fix, since all I had to do was to upload my most recent Bookmarks file from my Firefox installation.
4. Another page which is kind of dead is the "Recent Articles" page, where almost none of the links seem to work anymore. This is because a lot of the publishers I wrote for became a victim of the dot-com bubble.
5. There are some exceptions to files that have CSS. My course files (such as the one for my data management course) stil has no CSS attributes, and probably won't (although I might change my mind later). The reason is that I would like for those pages to stand out from the rest for the students.

It was several hours' work, but it was very rewarding. It was a renovation of 10 years of old pages I haven't seen or done anything with since I first made them. Some new graphics were created; others were removed.

Links are being repaired; updates are pending

The broken links have been updated and some have been deleted, normally because of duplication. The process is on-going and should be completed some time later today.

I had promised people that I would have an updated FAQ out by the end of June. So first I will begin by updating the web site. The last FAQ update was on May 7, 2004.

The next FAQ will be out soon with a plethora of repaired links and some updated information and posted on the USENET newsgroup sci.bio.food-science. You may view the FAQ either on Google Groups or on several web sites worldwide.

Alimentarus.net is on the air!!!

The FAO/WHO decided recently to move their Codex Alimentarius from www.fao.org to a new site called www.codexalimentarius.net. The copying of names wasn't intentional, and it may be likely that the new site was set up after January 2005, just after mine was set up. Guess I got some links I gotta update also. I have a link to the Codex Alimentarus at the FAO site, but of course it no longer works. For those who have misled themselves into thinking that I represented the FAO or WHO in any way, I now offer a link on the top of my main page to the correct FAO site.

I set the site up because I am weary (as many of you must be) of most media, including websites, print media, broadcast media, and so on, that is full of misinformation, propaganda, and hucksterism. While I offer very little information myself, I offer you information of leading authorities all over the world through my web links (which are soon due for another major update).

For the benefit of those at the FAO/WHO, I have never received any email where it was evident that someone wanting to correspond with me may have mistaken my site for being an FAO/WHO website, and demanding "where is that Codex Alimentarius document?" (which I don't have on my site).

As for the FAO/WHO, in case you haven't heard of them, they are a good organisation, and a great source of world statistics on health and nutrition. Their Codex Alimentarius documents set the only serious documentation for food composition that exists for a world-wide audience of consumers, nutritionists, dieticians, healthcare workers, manufacturers, traders, and governments.