Blosxom 2.1.0 released //at 02:03 //by abe

Today I had the honour to prepare and announce the first Blosxom release after exactly two years and six days.

The primary cause for the Blosxom 2.1.0 release date this week was to get our development efforts of the last two year into Debian Lenny with a nice version number (i.e. one without snapshot dates in the package version ;-). The second biggest cause was that it just was time. But Debian Freezes always give you a good kick in the ass. ;-)

Rhonda plans to prepare an updated blosxom package for Debian during the day. (Update 25-Jul-2008: Packages are available.) So if Planet Debian is broken in a few days, you know whom to blame: Me and my last minute bug fixes. ;-)

But since you seem to be able to read this, the release shouldn’t be too broken – because of course my blog already runs the very fresh Blosxom 2.1.0 release. ;-)

WTF per minutes and yet another popular Blosxom-alike I didn’t know about //at 02:44 //by abe

Today while reading Planet Webtuesday, I stumbled upon a nice cartoon about the one and only measurement of code quality: WTF per minute.

Somehow I noticed that the blog in which this cartoon was posted in is powered by Blojsom, a Blosxom derivative written in Java (and nowadays database powered). I already have heard of a lot of blogging software which works similar to Blosxom and often is also named similar, e.g. Pyblosxom or Blosxonomy, but Blosjom hasn’t been noticed by yet although it is mentioned in Children of Blosxom where I first noticed Blosxonomy.

So far, so good, but what really surprised me is that a blog engine developed after Blosxom’s ideas officially made into MacOS X 10.4 Server. (BTW at a time, I neither had a blog nor knew about Blosxom. :-)

Plugins in the Blosxom Project CVS //at 00:34 //by abe

Since yesterday, my Blosxom plugins are versioned in the Blosxom Project CVS repository together with those of most other Blosxom developers.

Cause for this is, that — besides first steps towards Blosxom v4 (we better forget about v3… ;-) and intergrating existing patches (e.g. the Debian config file patch) to Blosxom v2 — the Blosxom developers want to release a Collection of common Blosxom Plugins as a Plugin distribution so that no one needs to gather the often needed plugins from various sites on the net but get them from first hand and also in some kind of a supported way. A first release candidate is on it’s way.

And for those who thought good ol’ blosxom is dead: There never was so much traffic on the blosxom developer’s list like in the past two months — over 160 mails each!

Now playing: Eiffel 65 — Blue

Editor at The Unofficial Blosxom User Group //at 03:43 //by abe

A few days ago I joined Douglas Nerad as an editor of The Unofficial Blosxom User Group, an of course Blosxom running blog about Blosxom and full of quite up-to-date information (in comparision to the neglected official site).

Today I posted my first article there which covers an FAQ coming up again recently on the mailing list.

Blosxom Plugin Tagging Version 0.02: New Features //at 19:17 //by abe

Just hacked a few new features for my Blosxom plugin Tagging. It now shows you how many times you’ve used that tag. The number is always shown as title attribute to the link, but can optionally also be shown in parentheses behind the tag name or by the (CSS based) font size and/or color (start and end sizes/colors configurable). Also some default values changed (to my current configuration :-).

I saw that font size feature quite often during the last weeks and I liked it. I first tried to figure out, which system offers that feature and found that at least Serendipity’s freetag plugin offers it, but didn’t want to download Serendipity just for the plugin. So I decided, the algorithm for calculating the font sizes shouldn’t be that hard to find and coded it from scratch by my own. :-)

And while coding it I noticed that changing the color instead of the font size could be done the same way and that this feature isn’t much more difficult. So I implemented it, too.

Another new feature is that you now can configure the minimum number of postings a tag should have to show up in the list of tags.

The result can be seen in my blog on the right side under “Tag cloud”.

Now playing: Falco — Der Kommissar

Tagging with Technorati style in pure Blosxom //at 03:22 //by abe

Short summary: I can’t stay away from coding Blosxom plugins. Perl rules. PHP sucks. ;-)

• New version 0.04 of the tagging plugin, supporting Technorati style tag links to many resources.
• New add-on plugin pathbasedtagging to the plugin tagging, implementing Technorati style tag links in pure Blosxom without any help from Apache’s mod_rewrite.
• New plugin dept offering Slashdot like “dept.” lines for Blosxom postings.

Supporting Technorati style tag URLs

After releasing the last version of my Blosxom plugin tagging, I noticed that Technorati only seems to like URLs ending in “/tagname” but not ending in “=tagname” (as they do if you use classic query strings instead of the path info), even if the a tag has a rel="tag" attribute. And not only I noticed this but also some other users of the plugin. (Although I do wonder how Furl made it to a Technorati partner with URLs like http://www.furl.net/furled.jsp?topic=tags…)

So I somehow had to change the syntax style for my tags. This wasn’t very hard for the links, but I wanted them to still link to my blog and not to Technorati, Flickr, Wikipedia or any other external resource.

Implementing Technorati style tag URLs

The obviously easiest solution for someone who’s using and administrating Apache web servers for nearly ten years now was to use some mod_voodoo—eh—mod_rewrite:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi/tags/(.*)$ /cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi?-tags=$1 [PT]

That way I could use Technorati style tags and had a well performing solution. But somehow this solution wasn’t that satisfying since it wasn’t pure Blosxom and therefore had some dependency including access to some Apache config file. (Even if the config file was called .htaccess. ;-)

A pure Blosxom solution

A few days ago I somehow noticed that in general a special behaviour on some URLs could also be implemented using Blosxom’s API. Using the entries function to modify the Blosxom internal path itself before Blosxom or e.g. the entries_index runs but not returning any hashes, allows to have some path like URLs not being treated as a path by Blosxom.

Unfortunately this couldn’t be incorporated into the tagging plugin itself, since plugins doing such path interpreting voodoo needs to be ran before any plugin supplying an entries function runs. But the tagging plugin must run after such a plugin. So I created the small add-on plugin pathbasedtagging which is solely thought for use together with the tagging plugin (but may have other, yet unknown purposes).

And since I got asked if they could use the tagging plugin to link to external tag URLs instead of the own blog, I included a ready to use list of more or less popular external tag URLs including Technorati, Flickr, del.icio.us, de.lirio.us and Wikipedia.

from the slashdot dept.

Since I’ve always liked the often sarcastic or even evil comments inside Slashdot’s subtitle alike dept. lines and since I’m also used to use them at Symlink, I wanted them in my blog, too. Time for a new plugin.

The basic work of parsing out the data from the text files the posts reside in was already written for the tagging plugin. So I just had to use that code, simplify it and add some little more code to get the dept plugin whose results you can see in my blog directly beneath the title of a posting since a few days now.

Update 02:52h

Hey, see my Technorati profile: It worked! Technorati recognised the tags! Yeah!

Blosxom plugin multcat released //at 19:58 //by abe

I like the idea of categorising blog posts and I like blosxom, but blosxom doesn’t allow you that one post belongs to several topics on different branches of the topic tree. And since there doesn’t seem to be a plugin providing such a feature — even not after looking through the blosxom plugin repository for the third time — I wrote it by my own…

So here is the blosxom plugin multcat, version 0.01. License is GPL v2 or higher.

multcat allows you to have postings in multiple categories by setting appropriate symbolic links without having them multiple times on the main page (or any category’s page which includes at least two categories, the posting appears in). It is designed to work together with categorytree, which still counts all occurrences of a posting.