I just switched this site to blogofile and comments to disqus.
I imported my old comments quite carefully, which included email addresses, so for those already with a disqus account you may find that if you do a profile merge you'll be able to add any comments you made on this blog to your disqus profile.
There are a few problems with formatting of old comments, but mainly they should look right.
There are redirections in for feeds, and permalinks should be identical but your feed software may get confused and mark posts as new - sorry for any inconvenience.
My motivation, for those interested:
Blogofile works nicely. I used version 0.7.1, which copies the 'controller' code into the current directory. This allowed me to add the few things that were missing (mainly my 'Related posts' feature) and make a few customisations.
Blogofile also now handles all the other static pages in the site — not a huge number, but worth having a decent templating solution for.
It also allowed me to try out the mako template engine which works very nicely. I also used it to convert the old comments to the WXR file that disqus can import. When you need the full power of Python in a template, mako is great.
]]>As I find software I need but which doesn't have an AMD64 build, I'll rebuild it from deb sources and upload it. So far I've only done kio-apt and monotone. I'll put a proper page up listing what I've got soon.
For now, you can get the packages using apt-get and adding these lines to your sources.list:
deb http://lukeplant.me.uk/debian ./
deb-src http://lukeplant.me.uk/debian ./
I've only tested them with Ubuntu, which probably corresponds to Debian sid (unstable). I may also accept requests for building AMD64 packages for those who don't know how (or can't be bothered!).
By the way, the instructions for building monotone warn that you'll struggle to build it with 128Mb of RAM, and they weren't wrong! I found the g++ compiler using up to 170Mb to compile that thing!
I've now started playing with it for the rewrite of cciw.co.uk which really needs to be done. However, I don't think it will really be a distributed development project (which is what monotone is for), unless there are some more CCIW people who know PHP and are interested in hacking on this. Anyone?
]]>The web pages may look fairly similar, but under the hood it's completely brand new. One new feature is a much better categories system - have a look at the side bar - and a proper template engine, which is reflected in the fact that the title of the page changes on the pages for individual items, amongst other things. Also, for those of you using the RSS feed, have a look at my feeds page where you can customise your feed to posts that are of interest to you. The comment forms now also have a 'Preview' button.
The lack of filtering by category was one thing that was holding me back a bit - I'm aware that posting about software and computers half the time is going to make this fairly boring to most of the Christians who might read this blog. But now you can filter that out yourself!
I was pleased with how quickly I was able to develop this lot, and with the quality of the resulting code -- it took me about 5 evenings, and then about half of today to add basic admin functions.
My method is based around the excellent PHP Template Engine I mentioned before. Did I mentioned that it is the best PHP Template Engine there is? It's really great (that's for Google). In total I've got around 1600 lines of code, but that includes the template engine (which is only about 40 lines), admin functions for adding, listing, deleting and editing posts, a very simple but powerful flatfile database class I had to write at the same time, functions for getting cached remote files (used for my blogrolls), the RSS feed, the RSS feed picker, and a trackback server (pinched mainly from WordPress), as well as the front end stuff. I've also implemented a kind of MVC (Model View Controller) system, and I have a complete data access layer (though one which is as simple as it can be - due to PHP data structures my data model is reduced to a list of constants). I've loved how flexible the template engine stuff is too - you can use it for as much or as little of any page as you want.
Lots of things came together to make this project first very quick, and secondly something I'm proud of (can you tell?!): First was the template engine, and realising that the goal is separation of presentation and 'business' logic, NOT separation of PHP and HTML (or separation of declarative and imperative code, to put it more generically); Second, keeping in mind lots of the criticisms of OOP I've been reading, especially Object Oriented Programming Oversold and related articles; third, and ironically, being more aware of MVC and other design patterns; fourth, having a better grasp of how to design databases. The resulting code tries to use a variety of paradigms as and when they are useful. It also uses some techniques and ideas I've not seen before, which at first seemed like a bit of a hack, but after reading some more of the stuff about Table Oriented Programming I've now decided are a deliberate move!
The code still isn't perfect (or complete - I haven't don't bulk moderation of comments yet, or admin front end for adding categories), and it hasn't totally eliminated in all areas the tedious mapping of database fields to user interface fields, which was something I was aiming for. There are also things I'm still working out and experimenting with, but I've got a pretty good basis for further PHP apps.
One nice thing I've implemented is separation of the presentation and control of forms such as the comments form. This will enable me to make it fairly spam proof in the future, which is fast becoming a priority.
I'll be writing up separate entries on the range of things I've learnt with this project - it has been frustrating not having the software complete enough to use it for blogging for this past week!
]]>I guess this is the fundamental problem with spam - it's so cheap that it doesn't matter how incredibly ineffecient it is. This means the spammers will continue to the point that every useful but unprotected feature of the internet is ruined beyond repair, at great loss to internet users in general and very little gain for the spammers. Sigh....
What is even more worrying is mindless vandalism, such Wikipedia Vandalism, which does the perp's no good at all. I wouldn't be surprised if this kind of things actually causes the demise of many useful parts of the internet.
]]>The first was my site - the width of the pages was getting to me. What you really want is it to be a fixed number of characters wide, as text that is too many characters wide is difficult to read. If the user changes the font size, the rows should get wider proportionally, but the rows should never be wider than the width of the page (otherwise you get nasty horizontal scrollbars). If there is room, the text should be centralised in the page. I think I've achieved those aims now, if you want to see how look at the source! (I don't think all of them are achieved perfectly in IE, due to IE's limitations, but with normal options it should look OK).
The next tasks are more tricky:
For both of these, I'll be using a Template Engine implemented in PHP. This is the simplest, smallest (core routine is 25 lines of PHP!), most elegant and the most powerful templating engine I've seen - on which subject I've got a lot more to say. As I re-implement the website, I hope to do a number of things:
So much to do, I better get going...
]]>First, if you have a personal website and real content to offer, read this article on Promoting a Personal website on TechUser.net. The vast majority of traffic to this site is for genuine content that helps people - my way of trying to give back something to the open source community - and not to my boring opinions on this blog.
Second, ask yourself Do Hits Matter? and read that article (also on TechUser.net), which is about doing something with hits. If on the other hand you're only interested in staying in contact with friends and some of the blogosphere via your blog, then why do you need millions of hits?
Also, as RSS begins to take off, then you don't have to worry about keeping people coming back. They get your new content when it comes, and you consume very little of their time until then. For example, the KDE articles I publish have an RSS feed, to which a number of people are definitely subscribed, so they are notified when I add new stuff which is of interest to them. I personally use RSS massively - Bloglines is just great for this - I have a huge blogroll, but it only takes up any of my time when people actually post. I imagine and hope RSS will become more and more mainstream.
]]>I also have hits - I was surprised to find that last month my site had over 5000 page views, which I think isn't bad seeing as when I started the site in May I got just 125! Also a fair number of people are finding my site via google with all kinds of searches, some leading to this blog, quite a few to my other pages. Quite scarily, I found I've been reached a number of times via this search, for which I'm currently top - I'd never really thought what a responsiblity it is to post things on the web until I found that out.
And last but by no means least, God has given me a new job! For the past two years since graduating I've been self-employed - but that has involved a lot of being not-very employed (also known as being bone idle). But no longer. I had an job interview on Friday for a software development company in Leeds, and got an offer yesterday. So I have to say goodbye to being my own master, goodbye to spending silly amounts of time on the web, goodbye to late night hacking sessions, and hello steady salary!
]]>Now, to go and get a life...
Update - also added Trackback. This post is now officially my test post for testing out all these things
]]>I've been hacking away at the CuteNews code (that runs this blog and the other news on this page), and got some more things to my liking:
URLs reduced down to a single query parameter, which means that Google should index this lot now.
Hacked the archiving functions, so I can now safely archive old posts and their permalinks won't break
Improved my RSS feeds (again!), this time to include the <guid>. Which means that aggregators will again be confused, (sorry to those who are subscribed, I noticed in my logs there are a handful), but now it's the last time, as long as the aggregators respect <guid>. I should even be able to edit the post title/body and it won't appear twice.
But it's not enough. I added CuteNews to this site just for a few pieces of news I might need to post. I started my blog because, having already got a news system, it was very little extra work. But it just keeps growing... The next thing I need if I really want to be a blogger, is pingpback. Using other people's code is often almost impossible (often it's so badly documented it's incomprehensible; or organised such that it's un-reusable (even if it's OO)). So I'm going to end up implementing (at least half of) this myself. And then I'll decide that I need trackback as well! And then, I could really do with making it XHTML, and improving accessibility...
You can never get enough hits either. A couple of days ago I posted a link on dot.kde.org to a tutorial in my new articles section. dot.kde.org is a popular site, and according to my logs it must have generated a thousand hits already, which is more than the rest of the site got in the past six months, and the visitors who bothered to rate the article were impressed, but it's not enough, I want more.
But why? The first one is easily explainable - I've got not enough to do, I'm an incorrigible tinkering (that is, someone who loves to tweak and mess around with things, rather than steal them), and I'm a programmer - conclusion: I'm going to end up writing myself what I could have downloaded in the first place, because it's more fun!
The second one is more disturbing. Although there is some selflessness in the articles I've put up (sharing knowledge, helping others, writing it so that most newbies would still follow etc), and blogs have a helpful social function, I have to admit that a desire to be noticed, to be recognised, and, above all, to be aplauded forms a large part of the motivation here. The number of websites, bloggers, and articles on "How to get quadrillions of hits to your blog" make me realise I am in good company - or should I say numerous company. But that's not much of a comfort when my energies really ought to be chanelled elsewhere, not least in a desperate concern for the recognition and glory of the Lord Jesus. Hmm.
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