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Go get your fix.

It irks me that WordPress 1.5 has nofollow plainly implemented in comments instead of providing an option to leave links as-is. Thankfully, Kim wrote the DoFollow WordPress plugin that makes sure every comment link is nofollow free. Lets just say, I believe in punishing spammers, rather than punishing legitimate commentors because of the spammers.

Looks like I don’t have to shave my beard.

Not exactly breaking news, but Wordpress 1.5 is out. Michigan State’s spring break is next week, so I’ll have some extra free time. If this site isn’t upgraded by 12:00 AM EST on March 14th, I’ll shave my beard.

I’ve temporarily turned on comment moderation. Either SpamKarma is broken, turned off, or suddenly inffective. A bunch of bestiality and incest spam has gotten through the filters in the past few days, so I’m locking things down.

Update: Oops, it looks like I deleted a bunch of comments by accident. Doh.

Today is one of those days I can’t get ideas out fast enough and it’s very frustrating. It all started with the idea of me setting up a work blog internally. The things I’d like to use it for are as follows.

1. Give project updates as things progress.
2. Clip interesting posts from other blogs to my work blog.
3. Code review with peers.
4. Share experience and tips as I find them.

So, I talked with my friend Ryan about the best interface for clipping from a blog and having a tool grab the pertinent RSS area. Turns out we want the following process to appear to users who want to linkblog.

1. Right click a permalink for a blog.
2. Click “clip this”.
3. Full contents of the article (taken from rss item block) are credited and syndicated in new blog.

We didn’t care if this behavior was in an aggregator like Bloglines, or a plugin to Firefox that posted the necessary information to WordPress. We didn’t care if the tool created a feed somewhere that a WordPress plugin could read, or if it spoke directly with WordPress. What I wanted is a tool to automatically clip a post and make the clip go live on my site.

Inspired, I downloaded another cvs copy of WordPress and started to hack on this. But in the midst of that, I started thinking about how co-workers were going to use the internal blog, and I realized they should be able to read the blog from anywhere. Okay, so I want a private blog that’s accessable anywhere… riight. The only practical, scalable solution for this is to use a VPN. Okay, no biggie, we need a VPN anyways at work. People connect to VPN, they can read the dev-blog and get RSS now.

But shit, I don’t get RSS, Bloglines gets it for me, and there’s no chance in hell of them getting into my VPN. The whole point of putting it on an intranet is so Bloglines and other people can’t read it. >_<

How do I fix this? Install Bloglines behind the VPN so it can access the site and serve me my feeds over a secure connection. But I can’t install Bloglines, I don’t own it.

So, Mark Fletcher, I know you’ve been concerned with a revenue model for Bloglines. If you’re reading this, please, take heed. Either offer a separate Bloglines installation to my employer for a reasonable price, or open source the Bloglines engine. Bloglines has overcome the performance problems I’ve complained about before and I’ve come to love your service because of the user interface. I hope that you see that your unique value, to me, is in your interface, not your centralized service. For the most part, AmphetaDesk does the same centralized aggregator deal, but its interface is terrible. You’re kicking ass when it comes to centralized aggregator user interface.

Even if your strategy for Bloglines is as a portal, as you imply in your recent writings, there’s no reason licensing of your engine can’t provide supplemental revenue. Google does it, I don’t see why you can’t. Allowing custom installations is valuable to the enterprise market with VPNs, it’s valuable to anyone who can’t use your service because it belongs to you alone. Better yet, make the engine extendable, let me customize it. Create great hooks for a plugin system. Open source Bloglines, and sell dual-licenses like MySQL. Give discounts to educational institutions. Really add to the Bloglines web-service, give us way more options than we have now. I don’t care how I get to customize it, as long as I can for a reasonable cost.

You see, as it stands, your centralized hosting hurts me. I know it allows users to get feed suggestions and search feeds for topics, but I’d really be interested in hearing how many users actually are using that functionality. My guess is few, though I may be wrong.

Bloglines is a great aggregator and there are many things I’d like to modify and tweak but I just can’t. Take the clipping solution I’d like above. This would be so simple if when bloglines clipped a post, it offered to keep the original rss item block instead of a link back to Bloglines. If your clipping feature built a custom rss of my clips, I could easily use it and syndicate the “best of” my blogroll. Alas, you probably won’t implement this feature in a timeframe reasonable to me, but if I could could somehow extend your system… well, then the sky would be the limit.

Thanks to Dan Lash for letting me know comments weren’t being allowed. Apparently, something with Spam Karma 1.8 was turning off the form, even though WordPress options were set to allow comments. Upgrade to Spam Karma 1.10 and bugs go away.

Get Spam Karma 1.8 for WordPress. I did and now I don’t suffer from comment spam. Install it , and you can be spam free too!

I guess this blog just recently became cool enough to receive comment-spam. Comment moderation’s been turned on for now, but I’ll be installing a slew of spam-fighting plugins later this afternoon.

My stomach just turned inside out and dropped to my feet. Good bye to my local cvs changes to WordPress.

I recently patched the latest cvs of WordPress to keep your tags when using rss summaries, so that links show up in people’s clients. Thankfully, I uploaded it to Mosquito, and it’s now safe there. I thought it would be a good idea to apply this against the latest 1.2.1 for people who can’t wait. Here’s what I did, see if you can figure out where I went wrong.


virgil2:Documents] bjornrud% wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
--10:47:06-- http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
== `latest.tar.gz'
Resolving wordpress.org... done.
Connecting to wordpress.org[67.19.16.238]:80… connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response… 200 OK
Length: unspecified [application/force-download]
10:47:07 (226.26 KB/s) - latest.tar.gz saved [238639]
virgil2:Documents] bjornrud% mkdir t
virgil2:Documents] bjornrud% mv latest.tar.gz t/
virgil2:Documents] bjornrud% tar zxvvf t/latest.tar.gz


You see, I didn’t change my working directory to the directory I wanted to unzip WordPress into (t/). As you might have guessed, I had a directory named WordPress already, and it over-wrote the files in it.

Woe is me.

By way of drDave, I see that there’s now a WordPress Plugins Database. It would be nice if you could see the license on these plugins, at a glance.

Update: You can see the license now, wahoo! Thanks drDave. :)

I subscribe to the mindset that code is art and language. It’s always a pleasure to see code generated art. WordPress category maps by way of photomatt.
Oops, I put in the wrong link. Everything’s fixed now. Here’s the wp category map in action.

WordPress 1.2.1 is announced. The main changes are some security updates that you need to patch, and the new login system which was giving many people problems.

• Download WordPress 1.2.1 (.zip)
• Download WordPress 1.2.1 (.tar.gz)

Please let me know if you have any criticisms or praise for the new design. The look is by no means finalized, and I hope to make it as useful to readers as possible. Lay it on me.

“Keeping it simply styled” is my new mantra for this site. I’ve been working on this layout for quite some time, which is ironic, considering how little there is now. I’m confident this is a large improvement on this site as I am of the opinion that the default WordPress style is far too cluttered, and many of the “features” are not used 98% of the time, according to my request logs. To be more specific, I feel that the majority of the default features in the sidebar belong out of sight, stored in a drawer for the rare occasions people use them. Seafood forks, spatulas, and whisks are all very useful when I need them, but I don’t keep them mixed in with my every day silverware.

Small tweaks will probably happen in the coming weeks, and I’ll be adding a few pages that I’ve been meaning to put up for a while like advanced searching, an about page, contact form, linklog, and music log. I’ll even be changing this style a bit to comfortably fit on top of my PictorialisII photo gallery.

On another note, I’m indirectly thankful that Microsoft Windows’ fixed-width fonts look so butt ugly. You see, I originally hoped to use Courier New as the font for the site, because as a programmer I figured it really adds a flavor to the site that fits me. On OS X, Courier New and Monospace look pretty slick, and so I thought I would differentiate myself from other blogs with a fixed width font. Alas, there’s a reason websites don’t use fixed width fonts; they’re very hard to read. Such was almost the fate of this site, that is, until I checked it out in Internet Explorer… *shudder*.

Excitedly, I bit off more than I can easily chew by volunteering to patch something in WordPress. It all stems from this bug.

I’m unhappy with the current behavior of RSS 2.0 feeds (I’m not sure about the other syndication formats) in summary mode. The problem is that while in summary mode, you can’t view any links offsite through the RSS feed. After much confusion, with the help of Dougal and Photomatt I learned that it was because the <content:encoded> tag in RSS 2.0 is dropped when a feed is in summary mode. <content:encoded> is the happy home of RSS data, the meat of your feed, that has all kinds of markup attached to it whereas <description> is meant only as a plaintext summary.

Anyways, my [not so] bright idea is to create a <content:encoded> section in the summary feed where the excerpt is truncated based upon the non-markup data. That means I have to ignore tags while at the same time being aware of whether or not I’m breaking the XML, and if I do, automatically fix it. The human brain can easily do this in a few seconds but defining rules for a computer to do it is taxing this human’s brain. Time for a break.