I was thinking a bit over the weekend about modifying Jay Allen’s awesome MT-Blacklist plugin to work with Blosxom. I just did some googling, and searching of the Yahoo Group for Blosxom, and came up with Doug Alcorn’s BlogSpam.
It’s based on the MT-Blacklist plugin, and uses the same blacklist.txt file. It even merges in email notification of new writebacks, making my own wbnotify_nosendmail hack unnecessary and redundant.
If you’re thinking of using Blosxom as a weblog in a public space, do yourself a favour and grab BlogSpam. It replaces the default writeback plugin, and only requires some minor customization. (I added some additional stuff to quote the name in the sender’s email address, and to use a specified mailserver rather than localhost - I’ll probably do some other minor modification to tweak the output message as well).
I’m poking around in the Pachyderm Flash template source files, and just came across this gem:
shell.isloaded = "nononono";
I’m not sure what “nononono” means, or where it came from. It may have been just too obvious or boring to use this instead:
shell.isloaded = false;
Especially when the code to test the shell.isloaded variable seems to expect a boolean anyway. At least the original authors had a sense of humour… ;-)
It’s the first document I’ve seen that focusses more on the educational side of things, rather than the technical. This approach is much needed, since the real implications of this stuff are not technical at all…
And, her flexible learning-object-is-whatever-it-needs-to-be-as-long-as-it’s-educational operational definition of “learning object” works for me, too.
I was frustrated because the Blosxomwbnotify plugin wouldn’t work if you don’t have sendmail enabled on your host. I don’t have it turned on on the commons webserver, so writeback notifications failed.
After some tweaking (mostly because I can’t seem to hit the right keys to save my life today. Come onMotrin, do your stuff), it’s working, and happily sending notifications of new writebacks.
I’ve had SSHPassKey installed for a while now - Bill Bumgarner wrote it back in his CodeFab days (pre-Apple), in order to make ProjectBuilder ask nicely for a CVS password.
I’d forgotten about it for a while (haven’t been using CVS), but I fired it up yesterday and set it to respond to SSH password requests - so I get a nice GUI to ask for it - and better yet, it’s Keychain aware, so I can ignore it after it’s set once.
Doh. I’ve been trying to get this working all day, to no avail. My installation of Macromedia Studio MX 2004 (with Flash MX 2004 Pro), has suddenly decided it doesn’t want to launch.
I needed both Dreamweaver and Flash today, and neither one wanted to show up to the party. Fell back on BBEdit to edit the HTML (actually, that was probably more efficient anyway, so no biggie), but I have to go through some Flash files to evaluate some requirements for a project. And that’s hard to do when Flash doesn’t want to run.
It looks basically the same (after a 30-second tryout), but has code completion, and the ability to invite folks to a shared document.
Looks like a good release (more info here: SubEthaEdit - Features), but it’s got a new network protocol which isn’t compatible with 1.0 - so everyone has to upgrade. So, go upgrade! ;-)
Alan just sent me a link to Mark Pilgrim’s Freedom 0 [dive into mark] post on the whole MovableType3 thing. It’s a really good read, and is pretty much in sync with my thoughts on the matter.
I’ve been thinking about this for a while (even before MT3). What we’ve got now in “blogspace” is essentially a monoculture.
Just about everyone runs MovableType. It makes a nice, big, juicy target for spamroaches/rat-bastards. Same problem in the OS world - Windows makes a nice juicy target because it’s essentially a monoculture. The folks who are in the “smaller”, secondary tools, (Blosxom, WordPress - for now, MacOSX, etc…) are somewhat sheltered, because they aren’t the low hanging fruit. Much bigger ROI for spammers to focus on the dominant tools(s), and forget about the little guys.
I’ll likely migrate the rest of our weblogs over to WordPress sometime in the future - it imports MovableType blogs (apparently), and has group blog features that aren’t appropriate for Blosxom.
I’ll still use Blosxom for my own blog, because I like it, but it’s looking like WordPress for the rest of the Learning Commons weblogs. I’ll do some test imports next week to see if it’s viable.
Just threw the switch, and now this weblog is managed by Blosxom 2.0. I tweaked the HTML so it should be almost valid XHTML/CSS (mimicking the MT templates I was using before) - except for one minor bug where anchors include spaces, making this page technically invalid XHTML Transitional. Not a big deal for now.
There may be some minor hiccoughs, like completely different URLs for post pages (but nobody bookmarked those, probably…). Both the .rss and .rdf feeds are present (althrough the .rdf feed is just a copy of the .rss feed for now - most readers should display OK, and I’m looking into a “real” .rdf feed (they’re implemented as “flavours” in Blosxom).