I've added two new sites to the blog roll this morning. Future Feed Forward is a site featuring humorous news from the future. It's sort of like what the Onion will look like in 2058. Via Boing Boing.
Ms. Wendolyn is cute, funny and has a big mouth. I gather she is friends with the pink, hairy sinner.
In a blatant attempt to pander to the lucrative but vision-challenged 50-75 age group, I've increased the font and narrowed the columns. You like? Anything else I should change?
If there are any other groups out there that think I'm not pandering to them enough, let me know. These things keep me up at night.
Update: Thanks for the feedback. Now the content is on the left, where it belongs. Dictatorship Democracy in action!
Happy Birthday to Drug War Rant, which is one year old. The Rant is focused on fighting the racist drug war, a war the government uses to steal your money, oppress people that have nothing to do with drugs, incarcerate people for minor offenses and punish harmless activity. Go read, go write and go vote.
Today we have the happy task of welcoming Simply Appalling to the blogroll. Dry wit, pithy prose, and incisive logic make for good blogging. We're looking into getting some of that stuff around here.
Via TalkLeft.
From Vice Squad's blogroll, I discovered Marginal Revolution, an well-written and interesting economic-minded blog.
Today, they link to a fascinating NYT Magazine article on bagel thievery. Trends in bagel theft reveal some interesting behavior about people who probably don't consider themselves thieves.
They also have some musings on what makes people liberal or conservative and consider the possibility that your political leanings are rooted in your basic personality. There is a wealth of political science research (none of which I can recall off the top of my head) that demonstrates pretty conclusively that the greatest predictor of political party identification is your parents' party identification. Despite my belief that Republicans are all petty and mean, I tend to think the same predictor works for political leanings as for pary identification.
One of the nifty things about Movable Type is that it comes with a search module all set up and ready to go. And the module, because it generates entries upon request, it can do neat Blosxom-ish things, like detect if you're logged in and, if you are, put a button to edit a post after each post. It's neat, and it's too bad that functionality isn't in the regular page view.
This plugin fixes that. It makes available a
This plugin will only work for blog's that use the same directory for data and MT. If your main index file is in the same directory as (or a subdirectory of) your mt.cgi file, you're good. Otherwise, the cookie detection doesn't work. There is a solution for this, but I haven't perfected it yet.
The big drawback to this code is it displays the edit link as long as you're logged in, regardless of whether you can edit the specific entry in question.
I fixed this problem in version 0.2.
INSTRUCTIONS:
- If you don't already have it, install the JavaScriptCookies plugin
- Install this plugin by dropping this file into your plugin directory. No config required. Woo.
- Add the javascript to your template by putting <MTJavaScriptGetCookie> in the <head> section.
- Add the <MTEntryEditLink> tag somewhere between your <MTEntries> and </MTEntries> tags.
Get the plugin here. Get other plugin/mod/flavour stuff here.
Update: Anybody know if it is possible to read a cookie set for a different directory than the one you are in? How might this be done in perl or javascript? Anybody that can help me with that gets my eternal love and affection. Thanks.
Update: I believe the answer to my question is "no".
I wrote a Movable Type plugin that creates convenient tags you can use to drop javascript cookie functions into your template headers. Put <MTJavaScriptCookies> in the <head>...</head> section of a template to give you the whole menu of cookie functions: setCookie, getCookie, deleteCookie, and fixDate. Alternatively, you can go a la carte and use just what you need with the tags <MTJavaScriptSetCookie>, <MTJavaScriptGetCookie>, <MTJavaScriptDeleteCookie>, <MTJavaScriptFixDateCookie>.
To install, just drop it into your plugin directory, then put the tags in your head as needed. Finally, use the setCookie, getCookie, deleteCookie, fixDate functions in your javascript.
Please note that while I packaged the javascript in a plugin, I did not write the javascript. I ganked it from Web Reference.
Get the plugin here. Get other plugin/mod/flavour stuff here.
This morning, Brutal Hugs made the move from Blosxom to Movable Type. Things might be a little strange for a day or two, but everything should be normal very soon.
One unfortunate aspect of the move is that permalinks pointing to the old blog aren't going to work perfectly. They'll end up pointing to all the posts for an entire day instead of just one entry on that day. This will be a minor inconvenience, but it's quite annoying. We're working on a solution, but don't have one yet and maybe never will.
MT will be my fourth "blogging" system. I started hand-coding links in the mid-nineties, moved to a hand-rolled content management system in 2000, then to Blosxom about a year ago. Each system has had its advantages and problems, and I'm hoping something as established and polished as MT will be my last move for a good long while.
I often wish I had those old entries from back in the day. They wouldn't be interesting to anybody but me, and surely most of the things I linked to no longer exist, but it would be like going through an old box of photos, remembering the places I've been and the things I've seen and done.
Much thanks to Rael Dornfest for gifting Blosxom to the open source blog community. MT is free as in beer, but Blosxom has the true open source spirit of *nix coding ingenuity. I have a parting give-back for the many people that have contributed code, hacks, plugins, templates and help to Blosxom bloggers. It's the mtexport plugin I used to export all my entries and writebacks so MT could read them.
Lots of people have little widgets on their blogs to keep track of and automatically link back to frequent referers. Now Blosxom users can have these widgets too.
This plugin allows you to automatically link back to people that link to your blog. It populates $referer::recent with the most recent referrers to your blog. It orders the list by number of hits referred and is smart enough to combines hits from different referral URLs on the same domain. It won't detect hits from the domain on which your blog is hosted so that users don't see your obsessive reloading of your page. It also allows you to specify a list of URLs to reject so you can prevent people that reach your site through Google searches from clogging the list too. It also has the ability to let you specify pretty names for the blogs that connect to you so users see links to Bob's Blog instead of bob_blog.com or whatnot.
Grab the plugin from the Flavours, Mods and Plugins page.
Somebody on the Blosxom list asked for a very simple plugin that can just be dropped in to see if his plugin setup is correct. So I tossed together the test plugin.
Just drop it in your plugin directory and load your blog. No need to mess with your flavour files at all. You should see "TESTING...plugin found, loaded and run." above your posts. It might even appear twice. This will let you know that your plugins are being found, loaded, and run by blosxom. If you don't see those words, your setup is not working right.
You can get the test plugin on my flavours, mods and plugins page.
We've put together a little admin plugin for Blosxom. Basically, it's the web interface that some of you have wanted. It won't obviate FTP, but it will let you post, edit, delete, and move files. It will preserve timestamps when you edit (or not, if you so choose). It will also let you change timestamps to whatever date you want, which means you can remove the entries_index plugin.
The plugin takes a password to log in. If you're logged in, it adds options after every post that will let you edit that post.
It is aware of your subdirectories and will let you post to whatever subdir you want.
The biggest and stickiest issue with a plugin like this is file permissions. If you FTP a bunch of stuff to your server, a typical setup will result in files and directories that your scripts don't have permission to modify. We've worked around this a little by using Net::FTP and having the script ftp to localhost to gain access. It's not an ideal solution, but it seems easier than asking users to mess with taintperl and setuid.
Configuration is simple, or at least it will be. You specify a password, give it a valid username/password for your ftp server and then add two variables to your templates. Unfortunately, there is another step, which is patching Blosxom to pass a CGI object to plugins. We are hopeful and confident that future versions of Blosxom will do this without needing patching.
Future versions of the admin plugin will probably rely more heavily on Net::FTP, as that has been working out rather well on the Brutal Hugs system. Net::FTP is part of any standard Perl install, but we will try to support alternate methods for those users without FTP servers on their web servers.
Because this is still a pretty rough plugin, we're requiring anybody that wants to use it to send us an email. That way we know who is using it and can send out updates in the event of a problem. Also because the plugin is pretty rough, we're asking people to only use it on test beds. Hopefully, there are no data-eating bugs, but there might be some lurking in the code.
So, if you want to test admin version 0.1b1, let us know.
Update: Since we posted this, several people have suggested alternatives to using FTP. We're not sure where this will lead, but getting away from Net::FTP is definitely desirable. Now we just have to figure out what apache2's perchild mpm is and how commonly it is installed.
Matt Haughey, over at Whole Lotta Nothing is using Trackback and a Winamp plugin to get his Movable Type blog to display the last few songs played. It's a nifty trick, and we wrote a Blosxom plugin so Blosxom users can do it too.
Now everybody can know how bad your taste in music is.
Via Oliver Willis
I just released No-Host Trackback .02b1. The big advance here is skinnability. The look and feel of the comment and trackback windows is now fully customizable. More information is on the Trackback page.
I'll write some documentation when forced at gun point real soon now.
We have modified the No-Host Trackback script to also allow for remote hosting of comments. For details, go to the trackback page.
Alpha testing continues apace. Thanks to the fearless few that have signed up.
Thanks to Rael Dornfest for the idea.
I've put together a remotely-hosted Trackback tool, No-Host Trackback. It is ready for alpha testers. If you wish you could have trackback capability, but don't have the ability or inclination to deal with scripts, check it out.