Dev (old posts, page 10)

Total foobar

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I decided to release my old set of flavour templates on the flavour registry and in so doing totally foobarred all the times on all the files of my blog. I recovered most of them (because I have a mirror that's usually off by a few days), but then I had to guess on the times for the latest four entries.

So that sucked. Given what I just went through, I'm beginning to think it's a terrible idea to use the timestamp on the file as the mtime. Blech.

Thanks!

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I didn't expect either of these entries to drum up the response they did. I've gotten emails and comments from both entries that were way cool.

As a result, I've finally gotten around to building the flavour registry, I decided I'm going to see what's up and whether I'll work through a 1.1 release for PyBlosxom. We're working through what to do in regards to the filestat callback and possibly moving caching. I started investigating what would be involved in building a regression testing framework (which would double as a performance testing framework as well).

It's been a good couple of days. I really appreciate the advice and encouragement I've gotten. Thanks!

What to do with pyblosxom

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David Ascher started using PyBlosxom and there are a couple of other users who look like they're just starting to use it as well. I think that's fantastic--especially given that the project is on life support right now.

Life support? What makes me say that? Well, I've been threatening to do a 1.0.1 release for months but never did it. Development has all but stopped because there aren't any active developers. Back when I released 1.0, I told people I wasn't going to touch it for 6 months because I was really burned out on this project and I had too many other things going on. So then nothing happened except a mild trickle on the mailing lists.

I'm not sure what to do. I can't really take on another project and push it through the motions. PyBlosxom has documentation, but it's mediocre and has large gaps and it's spread across two sites one of which I don't think most people get to. The debian maintainer for the PyBlosxom package needs help updating the package, but I don't know enough about packages to help and haven't had the time to work on it. There has been some interest in a flavour registry, but it seems that there's only interest from a "we want a flavour registry" perspective and very very little to no interest from a "I'd like to contribute to a flavour registry" perspective. Blah blah blah.

There are a bunch of issues and no one to solve them. I'm really hesitant to throw my energy at this project again. Part of me wonders if I should just start solving some of the smaller problems that need to get solved (lack of testing infrastructure, lack of centralized documentation, ...) and then go from ther step by step. Seems so overwhelming.

Not to mention that my life is a mess right now--I'm still moving and I've got a list of promises I haven't fulfilled dating back to two or three years ago. Then I got bitched out on one of the projects I work on for being an elitist egomaniac. I just want to help identify and fix problems to make things better/easier/faster/more useful! Is that so wrong? I'm just one man! Gah!

my own archives plugin

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I've blogged for so many months now that the Archives listing on the side was getting pretty long. I don't really want a long list of months and years there, so I was looking for options.

Ned Batchelder lists his archives by year. For each year, there's a summary page by month which lists the dates and titles of all blog entries for that month. I really liked this idea, so I wrote my own archives plugin to use it. It's not exactly the same--the output is slightly different. It's good enough for me, though.

my pyblosxom plugins

form input text centering

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Had to look this up for a friend. The "text-align" css property allows you to align the value inside a form input text box.

  <input type=text style="text-align:center" name="blah" value="blah">

meta-refresh for html

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I keep forgetting this and forgetting where I wrote it down. Irritating.

   <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; URL=http://bluesock.org/~willkg/blog/">

Comment spam (part 2)

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I noticed that almost all the comment spam I get has the word "casino" in it. I added some code to the comment plugin to check the comment for the word casino and if the word is there, I ditch the comment. That seems to work very nicely (in the last 24 hours, it's ditched 7 bad comments and no good ones) though it's a short-term fix.

Long-term, I have a few thoughts. I may re-write portions of the comments plugin so that it saves comments originally in an "approval" stage. Then I'll write a command-line program that allows me to approve or reject all the comments in the "approval" stage one by one. That'll be pretty easy to deal with though it introduces a time-delay between when a comment is created and when it is posted.

Alternatively, I could just write a command-line program that goes through all the comments since the last one I "approved" and allows me to go through them one by one and weed out the bad ones.

Still, given that my blogs aren't related to casinos in any way, using "casino" seems to be a good filter.

wbgamazon plugin fixed

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Turns out it was creating garbled yucky stuff that hosed my RSS 0.91 feed. I fixed it so that if it thinks it's outputting to an RSS feed, it just returns rather than doing the transformation.

I should look into making this a postformatter--that would be better.

my pyblosxom plugins

Comment spam

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Ahhh--just got hit with my first comment-spam experience. That kind of sucked but was pretty easy to deal with since Ted organized comments as separate files.

If it happens again, I'll have to think about how to deal with it. Maybe switch to a comment approval process or something.