It’s all just 1’s and 0’s…

Yup, like any other blog this blog was the target of comment spam, had about 40 bogus comments over the last week.

I’ve made it useless to do so now by automatically tagging every link in a comment with a “nofollow” property, so that it won’t improve your page-ranking on searchmachines.

I’ve also added a plugin to do “hashcash”, meaning your browser has to do some work before it can post a comment. Normal users shouldn’t notice a thing. Let me know if it breaks anything.

Why am I not using CAPTCHA you ask? Well, for one thing it’s not very reliable, and second, it is not very friendly to visually disabled surfers.

I’ve switched away from using Blosxom. It seems like a nice tool, it works okay, but it’s not getting updated anymore and there is 0 plugin development activity. And that with the current ‘war’ on syndication standards, that just can’t be.

Another reason to move away from Blosxom is that it feels too hard to post something on the blog. I mostly wrote the XHTML myself (yes, I should have used the Markdown plugin) and had to update quite often. And I couldn’t just update the file itself, because that would change the modification date and therefore the publication date.

Anyway, as you can see I have now moved over to Wordpress and it’s nice to have such an easy point and click interface for the blog. Makes it much easier to post. You’ll be likely to see some more posts in the next few days.

The blog now also comes in your favourite syndication flavour, goto http ://www.je-ju.net/blog/feed/ and pick one of:

• rss (RSS 0.92)
• rdf (RSS 1.0)
• rss2 (RSS 2.0)
• atom (Atom 0.3, I hope to update this to 1.0 soon enough)

and attach it to the end of the url.

As promised earlier I would explain the configuration of this blog. The initial interest for Blosxom was made because someone I know already uses it. This however only made me curious about it and I went to investigate. Browsing through the site, I found a plethora of plugins and some very good documentation on how to install it. And (last but not least) it’s open source! So the choice was made.

After the initial walkthrough of the documentation, I had a bare, working blog, but it did not look very nice. So I set out to chance some stuff here and there, and make it conform to XHTML 1.0 Strict, because in my experience this is the HTML standard that all (serious) browsers understand and agree upon. This is reasonably simple, because Blosxom works with templates and every page is created on demand, using the flavour(e.g. html, rss) user requested. This means an almost ultimate seperation between content and representation, which follows nicely with the philosophy of XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS. Anyway, enough ranting about that, onto the gory technical details.

The flavour I use is available here(.tgz). There’s some references to plugins there and some other plugins I use are:

• SmartyPants - does some nice typographic conversion on quotes, etc.
• antispam - automatically translates email addresses in blog-entries
• breadcrumbs - provides a nice trail of categories when you select a category or specific entry
• calendar - the calendar on the right. This is however an old version, because I dislike the new one even more than I do this. I want more control on the HTML codes of the calendar output and it just wants to provide me a preformed block and some useless other accessor functions with which I can’t build the same output.
• categorytree - enables you to make a nice category tree, will create a page for that in the future.
• date_fullname - makes nicely formed dates with full names of weekdays and monthdays
• hotlists - makes a ‘hot’list of recent entries, suffers from the same problem as calendar
• rss10 - should provide me with a RSS 1.0 feed, but haven’t been able to make this work yet.
• seemore - allows me to split up long entries (like this one) (newest version doesn’t seem to work yet)

I couldn’t really find a nice way to do comments and writebacks/trackbacks with Blosxom, so instead I opted for using Haloscan. They allow you to create an account, use some bits of javascript and then you have instant comments and trackbacks for every blog entry, without any extra work on your end.

Concluding, Blosxom is very nice and flexible, but I’m getting the feeling that development on Blosxom has bled to death a bit. Because the website hasn’t been updated in a while, the creators weblog has not been updated in a while and most plugins at the website don’t seem to be in active development anymore either. Oh well, can’t complain, it’s a nice tool and not very complicated, might be a nice incentive to learn some more Perl (ugh! (1)) That’s it for now, but I’ll probably make some changes as I go and i’ll update this entry accordingly.

(1) Perl is a perfectly fine language, just not for me. I like languages that require you to make code look nice and don’t allow you to make something very cryptic (being able to do 7 line deCSS is funny, but makes it a huge nuisance when you want to reread/reuse old code.)

It has happened…I have gone along with the hype and the other masses and started a blog.

This blog is setup using the very elegant Blosxom. With some extra tuning, tweaking, etc. it is ready for use and conforms to most standards. Watch this space for some more info about how I configured it all.