Tassos Bassoukos - Blog Development

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abassouk@gmail.com (Tassos Bassoukos) — Wed, 1 Dec 2004 03:00:45 +0200

I've pushed some updates to the blogentis server today. They include some fixes to the RSS subsystem, admin-settable copyright statements to the feeds, finally some pages for user and blog management and some upgrades to the comment permisssions.

In reverse order: the new comment permission scheme will allow blog admins to better specify who can post comments to their blog. The currently available options are anonymous guests, guests with names, registered members of the site, members of the blog and nobody. These options also apply to the viewing permissions of the comments; you can restrict comment creation only to registered users but viewable by all and vice versa: comments created by everybody but viewable only by the blog members. Unfortunately, if you have modified your PostDetails fragment, you will need to replace the comment logic with something like this (watch the line breaks!):

## show the comment counter
#if($properties.detailEnableCommentCount)
#if($commentHelper.isCommentsShown($blog,$post) && $post.comments.size()>0)
[<a href="$link.setPost($post)#Comments">$post.comments.size() comments</a>]
#elseif($commentHelper.isCommentable($blog,$post))
[<a href="$link.setPost($post)#Comments">add comment</a>]
#end
#end

The blog and user management pages are only available to the site administrator and concern themselves only with addition and removal of blogs and users, not setting properties and settings.

The RSS subsystem has obtained a new configuration page where the blog admin can set the default format of the RSS feeds (RSS 2, RDF and ATOM are currently supported), and whether the default should include full posts or only excerpts. Several settings are now admin-settable, such as copyright statements, the address of the editor and the RSS feed language.

Whew, that was quite a bit more than I suspected...

Blog speed up

abassouk@gmail.com (Tassos Bassoukos) — Wed, 24 Nov 2004 03:11:58 +0200

I've implemented compression negotiation on the blogentis server, using lightweight gzip compression on all dynamic pages that generate HTML or XML.

So far the results are very impressive, as there is a noticeable speedup even on the same 100MBit Ethernet segment. Pages are compressed about 70%, taking an extra 7ms on my development machine (unoptimized, debug setup). I think it's worth it.

I've also updated the file upload handling, removing a dependency while at it. Should not affect users at all.

Another update, another patch

abassouk@gmail.com (Tassos Bassoukos) — Mon, 8 Nov 2004 02:13:51 +0200

This installation of Blogentis has been updated to the lastest version from CVS HEAD. This version has some important improvements over the old one, but there are some issues with the old templates that need to be addressed.

First of all, if you log in and try to administer your blog you will notice that the administation buttons are gone. In layouts/Layout.vm, change the line invoking the DefaultStripe fragment to #DefaultStripe($stripe.cssName $stripe.listName).

Second, in the top navigation, change the <span class="nav user"> tag to contain only the following code:

#foreach($linkTo in $navigationList.getNav("UserActions"))
#if($velocityCount > 1) | #end
#navbutton($linkTo.getLink($data,$link) $linkTo.label) 
#end

This will allow plugins to change the user action links, without needing to change the template itself.

Third, there is a new template tool handling security with the name $securityTool. You can replace all calls to ACLs and all permission checks with this tool. Supported operations include:

$securityTool.canEditThisPost
$securityTool.isBlogAdmin
$securityTool.isBlogEditor
$securityTool.isBlogAuthor

Improvements to the system include:

Blog URLs have been shortened by removing the prefix /blog/. A redirect is in place that leads to the new addresses.
A new Root Blog has been introduced that contains the aggregate of all other blogs. This also allows for the themeing of the aggregate blog. URLs without a blog are redirected to the root blog.
By default, links produced by the system are relative to the site, not absolute. This should lead to somewhat shorter load times on link-heavy pages, and actually implement permalinks, and allowing cookie-less operation.
The AdminBlog and AdminSite sideboxes should by default show only those actions that the current user can perform.
Improved compatibility with Internet Explorer due to buttons that would not respond.
RSS feeds with Unicode characters are working again
It is possible to view a summary of a whole year by visiting the year link on the location bar. A monthly view is on the works.

Doesn't play well with others

abassouk@gmail.com (Tassos Bassoukos) — Tue, 26 Oct 2004 11:25:12 +0300

I've just found out that Web Folders on Windows have somewhat peculiar requirements from WebDAV servers.

After investigating a user report on the unability to map the blogs media folder, I have found these interesting facts:

Web Folders needs the whole path, from the server root up (/), to be WebDAV-enabled, even if I just want to map a specific path. This breaks, as blogentis maps the WebDAV folders deeper into the tree, and the path segments leading to these folders produce redirects to HTML pages.
For some reason, while it requests authorization, the HTTP headers of the response have an empty password set.

Standards are good, you have so many to choose from (and apparently get them wrong)...

And the name is...

abassouk@gmail.com (Tassos Bassoukos) — Thu, 21 Oct 2004 02:36:15 +0300

It's final. The new name of the blogging system is blogentis, following a discussion with Eleftheria.

I've removed all names of the former blog name, done all the package-moving work, and registered the project on SourceForge. I'm currently investigating maven-ification of the project, and the results seem encouraging so far. Source code is not yet available on the project pages, but the final license will be the GNU Lesser General Public License.

I've updated the site, the improvements/bug fixes are:

Unicode characters work again in templates.
Saving templates/files as Zip files works.
Comments have been added to (almost) all templates indicating their role, extra parameters they provide etc.
Unicode characters should work correctly from non-web-folders clients in Slide.

I've also added support for LDAP-based user account information, but it is not enabled because I'm not satisfied by the current security status of blogentis - SSL is a must, and appropriate redirects have to be implemented.

Blog server moved

abassouk@gmail.com (Tassos Bassoukos) — Fri, 15 Oct 2004 02:46:45 +0300

As you may have noticed, the blogs have been moved to a different server. Please do not bookmark or send trackbacks, as they will move again in the near future to a (I hope) more permanent location.

Meanwhile, I'll be cooking up some more plugins...

Note for Sections

abassouk@gmail.com (Tassos Bassoukos) — Mon, 4 Oct 2004 08:15:17 +0300

Sections have been improved by adding a new property, title, which is the human-readable section title.

Previously, the Name property would be both the human-readable section title and the URI path fragment. This means that if you have customized SectionList or PostDetails fragments, you must make sure that the section's title and name are used in the appropriate place.

For all my Greek users (both of you), this means that you can finally use section titles written in Greek....

New version TODO

abassouk@gmail.com (Tassos Bassoukos) — Mon, 4 Oct 2004 08:14:57 +0300

I've finally put the new version that I've bee working on for the last couple of months online - this server uses it right now.

Some minor functionality is still missing:

Add templates, images or media using the web frontend
Sidebox configuration pages.
Some default images are not served by default.
Some checkboxes on edit do not appear in the correct state by default.

Unnamed Java Blogging System Progress

abassouk@gmail.com (Tassos Bassoukos) — Mon, 20 Sep 2004 11:26:35 +0300

Looks like Jablog has already been taken, have to find new new name - UJBS just doesn't sound that good (or sexy) . I've been busy the last couple of months implementing some exciting things that aren't yet deployed on thins site:

First, the template and media storage system is moving out of the database and into a Slide Store. That's right folks, you'll be able to access your files remotely using WebDAV. No more piddly text editing using HTML forms - use your editors directly!

The other large item is plugin support. Currently much of the internals have been switched over to plugins, however the UI still remains to be completed. The idea is that the server admin should be able to put a JAR file in a directory, and the blog admins get to decide wether or not they want to enable that plugin. To give a perspective, trackback procesing has been moved to a plugin, as well as RSS generation and the HTML-to-XHTML conversion when you create a post.

Consider this: you use Bookmarks Synchronizer in Firefox to store your bookmarks on your blog, then cue in a plugin that lets you specify a branch of the bookmark tree to appear on a sidebar. Or a plugin that parses iCal files and shows pending event.

The future, as they say, is bright.

PS: why do I feel unease when I see that Firefox has become a product?

Comment spam

abassouk@gmail.com (Tassos Bassoukos) — Fri, 11 Jun 2004 01:34:52 +0300

Interesting. I just got hit with my first comment spam. Perhaps I need to write a spam-catching plugin or implement one of the other methods (moderation/approval/registration)...

We'll see.