bedeviled mojo slop

Greetings from Upstate NY. I voted this morning at approximately 8:37 EST before coming to work. My polling place was a local firehouse about 2 minutes from my house.

As far as voting experiences go, mine was pretty easy. The parking lot was full and I had to wait for a car pulling out before I could park. Once I got into the firehouse, there were two tables, one for each voting district for that polling place. The tables had printed sheets of what you would see inside the voting booth and instructions on how to use the machines. There were 2 people by each book with the registered voters. Their name tags also had their party affiliation. There was a Republican and a Democrat by each book. I wonder if there was a law or a new law stating there had to be a Republican and Democrat for verification purposes. I wasn't asked for identification although I had my driver's license at the ready.

There were 4 people in front of me. Finally, it was my turn to vote and I stepped inside the voting booth. Electronic voting?! Could it be?! There weren't touch screens, but who cares. I guess it was electronic voting. You pushed the button next to the name(s) for the particular office. A green arrow lit up next to your selection. There was also a selection for "Write In" and instructions on how to go about writing in a candidate. After making my selections, I clicked on the "Cast My Vote" button and that was it. I'm not sure what type of voting machine it was ... honestly I didn't look. There was no printout of my recorded vote. So, there are probably improvements that can be made in this area.

All in all it was maybe 6 minutes of waiting in line to vote and maybe 15-20 seconds to vote my selections.

How'd your vote go?

Changes since the last release. Download source and/or updates or Quickstart bundle. Upgrading instructions.

Here's what I've been up to since the latest release of blojsom. I've added 6 new plugins that improve on the overall functionality of blojsom. One of the interesting aspects of blojsom development has been with the plugins. When I looked at where my development has been focused, it's certainly been with respect to the blojsom plugins. Whether it's quick-posting with the Bookmarklet plugin or podcasting using the RSS enclosures plugin, you've got a well-defined way that you can add to the functionality of blojsom.

Right now we're up to 56 available plugins if you count the web administration plugins! And you really have to count 'em since they're an integral part of blojsom.

Next up is the blojsom user's guide since a lot of the documentation on the site is more developer-friendly. That still hasn't stopped the daily downloads for a system that offers all of this functionality in a package that's less than 2.5 MB!

Core

• The blog-base-url and blog-url are now optional parameters in /WEB-INF/(blog-id)/blog.properties. If either is not present, its value will be determined automatically.
• Added key to user's session when they are authenticated to their blog, BLOJSOM_USER_AUTHENTICATED.
• Added context variable, BLOJSOM_REQUESTED_FLAVOR which is a String that contains the requested flavor for the current request.

Extensions

• Added support for the MovableType API XML-RPC methods.
• Fixed Atom API support with ecto.

Plugins

• Added Bookmarklet plugin to allow you to post quickly to your blog from a popup window.
• Added All Entries plugin which makes available all of the entries in your blog to your templates.
• Added RSS Enclosure plugin which allows you to attach an RSS enclosure to an entry.
• Added Comment Moderation plugin allowing you to pre-approve comments before they are displayed.
• Added Trackback Moderation plugin allowing you to pre-approve trackbacks before they are displayed.
• Added administration plugin for Show Me More plugin to allow you to change settings for the Show Me More plugin from the web administration interface.
• Fixed issue with Markdown plugin where the execution string to run the Markdown plugin needed to be specified in web.xml as well as each blog's blog.properties file. The execution string now only needs to be specified in the web.xml as given in the setup instructions.
• Modified Abstract Visual Calendar plugin to determine days other entries were posted in the same month when requesting an individual entry.

Themes

• Fixed class in Asual theme asual.css for emoticons images. Changed to emoticons. This is the class the Emoticons plugin outputs in creating a link to the emoticon image.
• Updated web administration to add a View site link.
• Added Vampire theme.