2009 Jun 28 - Sun
Blosxom Reinstall on Debian Lenny 5.0.1
It is almost time to retire my perl based bloging server software known as
blosxom. It has performed well. However, my page count is starting to get high,
and blosxom is taking longer and longer to process. For now, I've moved it to faster hardware while I work on a different
blog delivery mechanism (I hope to have Wt on C++ with PostgreSQL running the back-end soon).
Copying over the directory structure was no real problem. The only real thing needed was to put the mod_rewrite stuff
back in so the unsightly cgi-bin url portion is removed. By default, mod_rewrite is not enabled.
To enable it:
a2enmod rewrite
Here is what the rewrite stuff as it looks in sites-enabled/default file:
RewriteLogLevel 0
RewriteLog /var/log/apache2/rewrite.log
<Directory "/var/www/blog">
AddHandler cgi-script .cgi
Options +ExecCGI
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi/$1 [L,QSA]
</Directory>
2007 Sep 15 - Sat
Full Text RSS Blosxom Feeds
I previously wrote about getting a basic
RSS Feed going. That feed had titles only in it. I wanted to get text into it as well. I had some
problems getting it going. I think that if I ran my content through a validator like
FEED Validator to start, I might have made progress faster. The key thing is that I need
to write my text articles with out ampersands in the titles.
Anyway, I used information from
Operational Dynamics web
site to figure out the special command to include formatted content with 'CDATA'. I also used his plugin.
Here is the content of my files (wget may be necessary to get the content pure):
By removing a couple of minor elements in head.rss, the plug in rss20 won't be needed.
I would really like to get blog comments going. I tried them once but got too much spam. My next project is to migrate to Moveable Type.
Hopefully they have better ways of handling comments.
2007 Jan 26 - Fri
Blosxom ClickTrack
Today I've installed Nelson's
Clicktrack for Blosxom. It scans stories for urls and then turns them into url redirects so that they show up in the web
server's access log. As such, one can see what links people are clicking to go offsite.
Blosxom Page BreadCrumbs
Today I added Rael Dornfest's BreadCrumb Blosxom
Plugin. Works like a charm.
Blosxom Page_Titler
Today I added
Evil Genius Chronicles' Page Tilter 0.2 to my site. There was one syntactical problem in the file: on line 18, 'my' needed
to be added to the beginning of the variable declaration. Now it works like a charm.
2006 Dec 05 - Tue
Ping Weblog
I used the ping_weblogs_com found and described at Get Noticed by Pinging site.
The referenced page also lists a number of services to ping.
Adding a ping to weblogs.com was reasonably simple, except that I forgot that I can't do a $ping_weblogs_com
in the text article, but had to do it as part of a flavour file.
And as I didn't want to do it as part of a regular article presentation, as it may extend the page load times, I had to create some separate
flavour files. I then activated the
plugin in the story flavour.
Now I'm all set with to ping Weblogs.com.
BrutalHogs has a ping flavour to help a little with
the manual ping process. But I think that Ping-O-Matic probably
takes care of most things, even if it is only manually for now.
Adding an RSS Template to Blosxom
The RSS template/flavour supplied with the original installation of Blosxom doesn't really
conform to modern useage. At The
Unofficial Blosxom User Group, mention is made of Hal Halvorsen's A better RSS 2.0 template for Blosxom.
He mentions it might take ten to fifteen minutes to configure. In actual fact it was easier than
that. I copied his flavours into the root of my blog directory and made the following changes:
- story.rss20: added .article to fn in two places, since that is how I suffix each individual
blog article from a url perspective
- head.rss20: changed the copyright notice
- foot.blog: changed my index.rss link to index.rss20 for my xml tag
I was able to validate the feed with Weblogs.com Feed Validator.
So, in actual fact, adding the feed ability and documenting it in this blog took maybe fifteen or
twenty minutes. Easy.
2006 Nov 11 - Sat
Turing Test for Comment Submissions
People have designed various ways to prevent bots from successfully submitting web forms.
Perhaps the most common method is by using CAPTCHAs: common ones being those funny images
with characters
hidden in a disconcerting background. CAPTCHA is an acronym for 'Completely Automated
Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart'.
There appear to be a number of ways to defeat CAPTCHAs. But why bother implementing such
a scheme?
For the casual bot scanning the web, they may be tuned for bypassing CAPTCHAs. But what
if a site was to do something completely different? For example, David Wheeler's Comments & TrackBacks uses a simple arithmetic expression
to break an auto submission bot. So if every site out there did a variation on the theme,
auto-submissions could be prevented. On the other hand, if everyone did a little
arithmetic turing test, then we've come full circle with the bot being tuned to look for
such a simple test.
One side comment, Wheeler made his site, through a simple javascript, some how
better viewable with Firefox but less so with IE.
2006 Nov 05 - Sun
Flavour Bugs
Well they aren't flavour bugs per-se. They are more like misunderstandings. Well, not
that either. The word will come to me. My issue is that I have the two flavours: .blog
and .article. Each with their own foot and head pieces. Now I have to figure out how to
meld the two into one so that I don't have to update code in two different places when ever
I make adjustments to the web site.
Looks like 'ln -s foot.blog foot.article' fixes that little conundrum.
Blosxom WriteBacks
So far, Blosxom has behaved quite nicely. It is amazing how such a compact application can effectively do so much.
One addition I've wanted to add in order to make this site a two way street is WriteBacks. There were a few items
in the Blosxom Plugin Registry, but have been a bit uncertain as to the reliability of the code, as it really hasn't been
updated in quite some time. I finally did come across a link to
Kevin Scaldeferri's Blog, from the
Blosxom User Group Blog. He has a plugin, with recent
updates which provides WriteGack capability.
During the installation process, there are a number of things needing doing. One is that you need the flavours from
Rael's Original WriteBack Plugin. Don't install the
plugin, just the flavour files. Then install Kevin's plugin. There are some configurations in the file you'll need
to perform.
The trick with this is that you don't want all the comment submissions to happen on your main blog page, which will happen if
you put the various bits in your default story.flavour. Instead, create two flavours, I call the default flavour 'blog', and the
secondary flavour 'article'. In 'story.blog', along with the standard permanent link, you place the writeback count.
In story.article, you put the form to be posted. This draws the submission form only when viewing a single article. Use the
supplied foot.writeback for inspiration. Also, in story.article, you place the code to view the writebacks. Use story.writeback for inspiration.
Be sure to make the various variable updates in the writeback plugin, and you should be good to go, but for some formatting
and alignment issues you may want to tune.
Blosxom Categories
I installed Todd Larason's Categories Plugin, and I'd say it is another very easy
winner. I used the 'breadcrumbs' version rather than the heavily indented and space
consuming 'categories' version.
With this, I've reached my goal of a functioning Blog with navigation, advertising, and
writebacks. For the targetback thing I havn't quite figured out how it works or what it
does. Perhaps some one could 'writeback' and let me know how it works, and what I should do
with it.
Blosxom Calendar
I installed
Todd Larason's Calendar, changed a value in the config file to turn off caching, put two lines of code in my story.flavour
file, and presto, calendars. I wish all software were this easy.
I see he is using MovableType now. I've flirted with trying that a couple of times. I haven't quite had to
go quite
that far yet. We'll see what happens with my next project: showing a list of categories. If I can get that going, then I think
I've covered most of the basic features of a Blog site, and will want for little else. Famous last words.
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