It’s been archived as a feature article for posterity

Turns out that it was because I was reloading webpad in a window which I had previously used it, so the session (containing filenames etc) was still active. When webpad loaded, it was triggering the ‘save’ operation, and saving the now-empty main window as the file I was previously working on. All I’ve done is make it so that you can’t write a blank file now — if you want to delete something, you should be using the delete operation in the file dialog anyway.

One step closer to release! Blogs are still a sticking point tho… how/what to support on Blogger.com/MovableType is the thing holding me up. Complete blosxom support is already in there, and works wonderfully – I’m using it to maintain my blogs and website. The Blogger Atom API sounds really ugly and excessively complex, but I’ll let it stabilise a little more and then have a proper look at it I think…

Incidentally, adding the functionality for the fantastic blogging application, blosxom was completely trivial, care of it’s wonderful use of the file system of the server that it’s hosted on. In effect, blosxom blogs within webpad are represented as alternate home directories, and use all the same file access operations as the normal server actions do – excellent!

Check it out and get yourself a copy of blosxom if you’re running a blog, it’s the best thing out there if you don’t mind a bit of hackery and custom mods

It was wonderfully easy to configure, all I had to do was put in my own timezone, and it works out all times for posts based on the timezone of the server, in relation to mine.

Three Xs, therefore blosxxxom, that’s one for blosxom (Apple’s OSX), one for XML and one for XSL, which are the three technologies we’re dealing with here.

1. Install the theme plugin for blosxom and get it working (this plugin makes life much easier!)
2. Now create a new theme, with a suitable name (mine’s called ‘blosxxxom’ for the sake of the experiment, and it looks like this; page.blosxxxom. This theme should create a valid XML document from your posts.
3. Your XML output should refer to an XSL stylesheet, which will actually take care of doing the formatting, entirely client-side (style.xsl in my example theme file)
4. In the XSL file, just use normal XSL processing instructions to handle the output and presentation of the XML document into XHTML!
5. Point your browser to blosxom and tell it to use the flavour name that you used to create this theme, and you should be able to see what the output looks like. View the source of the document and you should see the plain XML produced by blosxom

Now, for a couple notes;

• I made my content_type value in the theme text/xml, but this forced blosxom to encode special characters to be nice for me. I found that it was better to comment this section of the main CGI out so that I could drop the values in, and wrap them in the CDATA tag seen in the XML theme.
• Rather than worry about what’s in the body much, I just wrapped things in a <![CDATA[ tag ]]> to be safe.
• Mozilla doesn’t currently display my output properly – it’s not doing links (or any tags) properly, and it’s just showing them rather than interpreting them as HTML. Anyone got any ideas on this one?
• There’s more to be done, but it’s a fun point to start at, and there’s no reason why you can’t add things like a COMMENTS element to your STORY node, or a KARMA, a META node with a series of elements – it’s pretty free-form if you’re only doing the XML for your own presentation needs!

Hope that’s inspired some people to try some things out that they might not have otherwise tried, and if nothing else, it just demonstrates how flexible blosxom really is!

Download blosxconfig BETA version now!

Here’s the details that I posted to the blosxom list;

WARNING: Back up all you plugins before saving changes via blosxconfig!!!

configure.php is a PHP script (duh!) so you’ll need PHP on your server to run it. You can pass a path to it to look for a specific config file via either a GET or POST request (GET use ?conf=path-to-conf.conf on the querystring, POST use variable name ‘conf’ with a value of a path to a config file). if you don’t pass a value, then blosxconfig will look for a file called blosxom.conf in the same directory as it, or die trying

The config files are very basic, and look a little bit like a Windows ini file, but it’s a custom style; The first line is similar to a unix ‘shebang’ line, and should look like this;

#@/path/to/plugins

where obviously the /path/to/plugins is the full path to where your plugins live – this should be the same as the $blosxom::plugin_dir variable configured in your blosxom cgi executable.

After that line, you have plugin sections which are defined using [plugin_name] – be careful that you use the *exact* name of the plugin, because the value is used for confirming the plugin’s existence

Under each plugin section, you define definable variables on a line each, in this format;

variable_name|type|default

variable_name is the actual name of the variable (as written in the script), without the ‘$’ or ‘@’ (in the case of arrays)

type can be one of ‘string’, ‘boolean’ or ‘code’. Arrays should be defined as ‘code’. Strings are enclosed automatically in quotes (“) and all types are followed by a semi colon when written to file. Booleans are presented to the user as a Yes/No select box (0/1 passed as values) and other types are presented as simple text input fields.

default is a value to use by default. make sure this makes sense (so for a boolean make sure it’s 0/1, for a string it’s a string etc). You don’t need to wrap it in quotes or anything, this is handled automatically.

WARNING: Back up all you plugins before saving changes via blosxconfig!!!

1. All plugin files which are referenced in your config file will be MODIFIED – they will technically be overwritten entirely, since the contents of the file are processed, then the lines that look like they define the variables in question are replaced with new lines, with the new values.
2. The config file will be updated with the new details that you specified and written back to file.
3. blosxconfig will load again, with all your new values in place, and messages telling you what happened.

Assuming all goes well, you’ve just used an external interface to reach into your plugin files and modify certain details. The hope is that authors of plugins (or community-minded participants) can supply the simple, 1 – 10 lines worth of config required to add to this configuration file, which can then be distributed with this little application to help people configure their plugins.

Please be aware that I have *NOT* tested this extensively at all, it was hacked together and seemed to work for a couple of plugins that I was running (the ones in the config file included) on a Windows test box, other than that I can’t make any promises. I’d LOVE if some people could try it out on some other plugins, on other systems, and let me know (directly if
you like) how it goes. I’ll fix any problems and then release it as public so that other people can use it.

Hope it’s useful for someone out there, and can perhaps eventually make life easier for some newbies (and pro’s alike

Oh yeah – did I mention; BACK UP YOUR PLUGINS BEFORE YOU TRY THIS!

On the suggestion of Andreas Banze, I’ve removed one small section which checked to make sure that the plugin files were executable, since as he pointed out, this is not necessary, they are just included in the main operation of the blosxom script, not executed individually.

Download blosxconfig BETA version now!

More information to follow regarding the changes, but I don’t imagine it will cause too many problems with too many people

Now that that is taken care of (ended up being a naming conflict within a plugin), I can eventually get around to doing what I had actually intended on doing, which is upgrade to the official release verion 2.0 of blosxom, and then implementing some more plugins to create better RSS feeds and probably sub-topic menus within the templates to aid in navigation of the sections.

Thanks to phpwebhosting.com (my web host) for giving me access to an error_log, even if it’s only a shared one across the whole server

1. Show number of visits/votes
2. Show positive and negative votes
3. Show Controversy Index
4. Show Karma Index
5. Show Visits Index
6. Only show posts with minimum of ‘x’ for;
   1. Karma
   2. Controvery
   3. Interest

You can download karma 0.3 and drop it in as a plugin immediately. It’s pretty self-explanatory if you understand the concept. To figure out the way that controvery and interest are calculated – have a look in the code for now, I’ll post the formulae when I get a chance

I got an email back from Fletcher Penney, who said that he’d develop it, and half an hour later we were chatting on MSN about the details. He’s already knocked out 2 draft versions and we are sorting out some great stats and uses for the information!

blosxom and its developer-community rules!

Also please note that I am using these plugins, so there are references to their output in the flavour files;

1. writebacks
2. calendar
3. breadcrumbs

That’s it – unzip and enjoy! I’ve named the flavour files *.dr to avoid overwriting any of your existing flavours, so that shouldn’t be a problem for you either

I think webpad offers a great way to manage a blosxom-powered blog remotely, since it offers a few easy-to-use HTML tools, while modifying the file directly on the server, which is just where blosxom wants them

1. Be able to post from anywhere (i.e. I want a web-based interface of some sort)
2. Be able to post from my Palm (I built AvantBlog for this reason, why not have AvantBlosx? )
3. A nifty little dialog-thingo allowing me to make quick posts (very similar to the Palm version) would be nice as well, something I could bookmarklet easily.

So I had a look around, and the first one appears to be pretty much available already, care of PHPetal. After that tho, there doesn’t appear to be a simple, clean interface available that could be hacked to use on Palm and as a simple little bookmarklet dialog.

My idea is basically to just provide the person with a very simple interface, at this stage it would consist of a select box containing a recursed listing of their blog directories, and a textarea where they could enter their post. As per blosxom, the first line would be used as the title, and I would either make up a filename based on the title, or just generate one from a timestamp.

What do you reckon?

This has taken quite a bit of work to get live, but I am quite happy with the way that things have turned out. The main addition(s) that I want to make at this stage are writebacks on my Notes section, so that I can hear what you guys out there have to say about things, rather than this being a 1-way only information device

Keep an eye out for the ability to comment on my postings here in the nearish future (hopefully!). When I get it working, it should also allow for trackbacks, so you can register comments on my posts on your own blogs if you like

I have made some pretty schmick “helper” scripts (even if I do say so myself), which allow me to manage a blog using directories, and you can link straight to a directory, and it will show you the blog entries via blosxom in that dir.

I’ve been spending some time on the projects section, getting the project pages up to scratch and re-formatted; it’s looking pretty good. I am taking a few of the old projects offline, because they don’t have any documentation, don’t work anymore, things like that

I’m not going to put a date on when the site will be live, but given the current progress, and the list of things to do still, I would estimate about 2 weeks. Here’s the current list;

1. Projects Sections
   1. Blogger API (functions, classes + meta)
   2. phpMassMail (also requires some work to make it 4.2+ compatible, and re-format documentation to include)
   3. JSSearch (would like to get some more information/documentation/examples included)
   4. JSValidate (want to update this to include the ability to open a popup window rather than an alert – optional)
   5. Client work and websites
2. Contact Form
   1. Layout/design
   2. Contingency design
   3. Processing/handling
   4. Result/output page
3. Search System
   1. Layout/Design (of the results, as well as extra options, defining manual entries etc)
   2. Processing system (integrating my manual results with Google/XooMLe’s results)
   3. Management of my manual entries (and a decent name for them

So there we go. That’s what I’ll be working on in the near future. And for those interested, I will be creating a custom search system, which integrates Google‘s results for within my website (using XooMLe) with a selection of manual “Top Picks” or “Best Bets” which I have selected for certain terms. I have the rough idea planned out already, just need to implement it in code. I will probably make the code available for download once it’s complete as well, so keep an eye out for that

That’s all for now – time to get back to life.

Shouldn’t be a hard modification to make, and I only have to make it to the archive processing script – so should be easy. I’ll add it before the site goes live.

It’s working so far, and I have added in the option of linking to ‘rss.xml’ within any directory in the blog-tree to get an RSS feed of that level/category/sub-blog. Sweeeet. Next up is to eliminate the permalinks needing to use the blosxom.pl script in the URL (i.e. so that archives don’t have to link to blosxom.pl at all).