bedeviled mojo slop

blojsom is … A full-featured, multi-user, multi-blog package written in Java that was inspired by blosxom. blojsom aims to retain the simplicity in design of its Perl-based "relative" while adding flexibility in areas such as the flavors, templating, plugins, and the ability to run a multi-user blog with a single blojsom installation.

The software behind Apple's Mac OS X Tiger Server Weblog Server.

Download source and/or updates if you're upgrading from a previous release.
Download the Quickstart bundle if you're installing blojsom for the first time.
Changelog describes what's been added in this release.

Upgrading instructions on how to upgrade from a previous release.

I talked a little bit about blojsom 2.23 before, and honestly not much has changed. There is a lot of functionality in blojsom 2.23. I guess I'd like to highlight the two biggest enhancements.

PERMISSIONS

blojsom is a true multi-blog and multi-user capable blog software package. It's perfect for group or team blogs. You can setup as many blogs as you want to run off a single blojsom installation. You can also add as many users as you want in a single blog. However, one of the shortcomings in the multi-user support has been that each authorized user for a given blog is treated the same in terms of permissions. If I've got 3 authorized users setup on one of my blogs, then all 3 of those users can edit categories, entries, templates, etc. That's not always desirable.

So, with this release of blojsom, each authorized user can be assigned individual permissions. I can now specify that my user is allowed to do anything and I can assign permissions to the other 2 users that only allow them to edit blog entries and add new categories. Or maybe I don't want to provide access to the web administration capabilities to a given user at all. Instead I'd only like them to be able to post using a blog client that uses one of the Weblog APIs like the Blogger, MetaWeblog, or Atom API. Maybe I only want them to be able to post using the MetaWeblog API. Maybe I only want to give them the ability to add, edit and delete entries using the MetaWeblog API, but I don't want them to be able to post images or sounds files that use the MetaWeblog API's newMediaObject method. Now, I didn't go that crazy in assigning permissions at the method level, but hey, it can be done.

Or maybe you want to write a plugin to allow people to register on your blog. Then you can allow only registered users to submit comments. Or like with the new basic authentication plugin, members-only or private syndication feeds.

All of that and more is possible now in blojsom.

PINGBACKS

I added Pingback support in this release. You can find more about Pingbacks from the Pingback specification. I guess the way I think about pingbacks is that they're like trackbacks via XML-RPC.

Here's the changelog, but click on the actual changelog for the relevant links.

blojsom 2.23 (Codename: Pravda) - Released January 31, 2005

Core

* Minor improvements.

Extensions

* Improved speed of XML-RPC handlers.
* Fixed a bug in the newPost() XML-RPC handlers to ensure the entries BlogCategory was properly getting populated before an event was fired.
* URLs for editing your blog via XML-RPC and the Atom API now require a trailing slash after the blog ID. For example:

http://your.host.com/blojsom/xmlrpc/default/
http://your.host.com/blojsom/atomapi/default/

* Added support for Pingbacks with the new Pingback handler.

Plugins

* New Plugins
* The Basic Authentication Plugin supports a BASIC authentication check so that only authorized users can read your blog.
* The Category Template Plugin allows you to define category meta-data so that you can load a particular template for a given category.
* The Cross Post Plugin allows you to automatically cross post entries added to any category to another service/blog that supports the Blogger or MetaWeblog APIs.
* The Enhanced Emoticons Plugin allows you to configure the available emoticons as well as their corresponding patterns to produce and emoticon images.
* The Gravatar Plugin attaches a Gravatar ID to each blog entry comment, which can then be used to display Gravatar (Globally Recognized Avatar) image available from gravatar.com.
* The NoFollow Plugin adds support for searching through hyperlinks in comments and trackbacks and adding rel="nofollow" for hyperlinks without this attribute. This removes any search engine ranking that comment/trackback spammers might hope to get from leaving comment/trackback spam on your blog.
* The Weather Plugin allows you to display your current weather forecast in your blog.

* New Administration Plugins
* The Permissions Administration Plugin allows to add and delete fine-grained permissions for users of your blog.

* Existing Plugin Updates
* Updated the Templates Administration Plugin to:
o Add new templates
o Delete existing templates
o Add new template directories
o Delete existing template directories
o Sort the list of templates and to return you back to editing the template after making an update. Previously, after updating a template, you would have to select and edit the template again to make an update.
* Authorization information is now sorted by the Authorization Administration Plugin before being displayed.
* Flavor information is now sorted by the Flavors Administration Plugin before being displayed.

Events

* Added a new CommentAddedEvent that will fire when new comments are added to an entry. This is also supported via the Comment API Servlet.
o Comment events can be found in org.blojsom.plugin.comment.event package.
* Added a new TrackbackAddedEvent that will fire when new trackbacks are added to an entry.
o Trackback events can be found in org.blojsom.plugin.trackback.event package.

Templates

* Added <category></category> element to RSS 2.0 templates.
* Added rel="nofollow" attribute to comment and trackback links in all themes.
* Added the following template macros:
o #DisplayWeatherForecast($weatherInfo)
o #MonthlyArchive($startingMonth $startingYear)
o #PingbacksAllowed($entry)
o #XMLRPCLink($entry $xmlrpcurl)

Libraries

* Upgraded OSCache library to version 2.1

Phewwwww ... a lot of discussion this weekend around the future of Groovy. I've been following some of the discussion just because in blojsom we've got a Groovy plugin which allows you to develop plugins in Groovy as well as a Groovy dispatcher which uses their Simple Template Engine as the basis for writing templates. Although, a lot of the issues being discussed probably don't affect our components much at all.

Either way, rock on guys.

Based on feedback from my English tea post, I purchased a box of PG Tips. I received the shipment today. I'll sample tomorrow.

So, my next question is, do tea drinkers in general or just English tea drinkers prefer electric tea kettles? Or is there no preference? As long as it's not water boiled in a microwave? I've already got a stove top tea kettle. I only ask because the PG Tips came with some literature pimpin' electric tea kettles.

Photon

Smart, intuitive, and highly configurable, Daikini Photon gives you the power to manage your Movable Typeâ„¢, TypePadâ„¢, Blojsom and WordPress photo-blogs in the familiar surrounds of Apple iPhoto.

Mark said it worked. Good deal. I'll have to give it a whirl later on tonight. Works just fine as shown hm'yah.

• who added to the discovery of the atom - It surely was not me (last link).
• mini shirt - I prefer shirts in small actually.
• the mistake band - They never should've formed in the first place.
• alcohol party - It's just not a party without the alcohol
• as a fucking boat anchor - Common usage, "Don't use that TV as a fucking boat anchor." or "Damn! I didn't know you could use a sack of watermelons as a fucking boat anchor."
• silly string livejournal icon - Seriously folks, is there any item on this planet that has not been turned into a LJ icon?
• baby shower templates for entourage - It's a niche market really.

Atomic Garden - Bad Religion

Boinx Mouseposé 1.0

If turned on, Mouseposé dims the screen and puts a spotlight on the area around the mouse pointer, easily guiding the audiences attention or to quickly locate the mouse pointer.

Wow! This is a pretty slick application. I'd definitely like to see it as a Control Panel.

I just remembered that their weblog is powered by blojsom.

Be forewarned ... when listening to the Katamari Damacy Soundtrack say on your iPod while taking a walk, one must resist any and all urges to try and roll cars, cats, dogs, lamposts, flowers, pedestrians, etc into a big clump. Other than that, have at it.

This is a really well done soundtrack as far as game soundtracks go. However, I had to play through Katamari Damacy before I could appreciate the soundtrack. I think I might not be in touch with my inner insanity from the game if I hadn't played the game before listening to the soundtrack. Anyhoo ... Maybe the best part about all the songs (except for maybe two) being in Japanese is that you instantly become that guy or girl you see in videos where they don't really know the words, but they mouth along anyway. I'm totally making my own words up as I go along. No song is the same twice. I love it.

Previously discussed, On Katamari Damacy.

Lodi - Creedence Clearwater Revival

Skate For Tsunami Fundraiser @ The Shelter January 29th

The Shelter will be raising money for the relief effort. We have teamed up with the Red Cross and Price Chopper to have an all day event. $15 at the door, proceeds to go directly towards the relief. We will be giving out tee's through out the day donated by 518PRINTS. Also we will be raffleing off all sorts of stuff from KAYO, IPATH, SATORI, REDBULL, VITAMIN WATER. Come out and show some love and help the less fortunate out.

JANUARY 29th-----all day long......spread the word!!!!

Check out the Shelter Skatepark if you're in the Albany, NY area.

Robert Woodward wrote in a comment on the rel="nofollow" post:

Just trying to spawn a little support for this idea since you folks seem to be working closely with the search engines.

The rel="nofollow" tag, while a step in the right direction, stops short of preventing automated harvesting of sensitive URLs from within a web page with a simple engine search.

What is needed is something similar, like rel="noindex", which would prevent the URL from being indexed by the search engines at all.

For example, I can change the name of my comment script and the spammers disappear until the next time google indexes my site, and then they come back. If the URL to the script wasn't in the search engine in the first place, the spammer would have to manually visit each site to figure it out - very difficult to do and would turn an automated spamming process into a very manual one.

This would also make it more difficult to find other sensitive URLs, yet have the rest of the page content indexed.

Another idea would be to create tags that search engines would respect and not index between the tags - sort of like the NOINDEX parameter you can put on an entire page, or a robots.txt file, but it would only apply to text outside the noindex tags. I can think of lots of applications to where you would want your page indexed, but not certain pieces within the page...

Just an idea that requires some significant thought, but I think one that should be considered. Thanks for listening!

I think the rel="nofollow" initiative is just the beginning of a set of tags that will allow publishers to control how their content is harvested.

In the case of blogs, it's like micro-control for micro-content.

Looking at my original title for the post "Shoo Fly, Don't Bother Me", it's like, "I want you to bite me, but I don't like to be bitten around the face, chest, neck, or head. But the rest of me is fair game."

Grrrrrrrrrrrrr, very grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

If your blog software supports categories and RSS/Atom (like Movable Type, WordPress, TypePad, Blogware, Radio), just use the included category system and make sure you're publishing RSS/Atom and we'll automatically include your posts! Your categories will be read as tags.

"It's not a panacea, but I think the initiative will help," said David Czarnecki, blojsom founder.

"Spammers are hoping that their comment spams made to blogs are indexed and will eventually increase their ranking in search engines for their sites," Czarnecki said.

This can be more than a mere annoyance for some blog owners, said Czarnecki. He pointed out that if a 3rd-grade teacher were to set up a blog for students, hundreds of comments about Viagra or online gambling would be more than unwelcome.

The nofollow plugin adds support for searching through hyperlinks in comments and trackbacks and adding rel="nofollow" for hyperlinks without this attribute. This removes any search engine ranking that comment spammers might hope to get from leaving comment spam on your blog.

Gravatar Plugin is a Blojsom plugin that attaches a Gravatar ID to each blog entry comment, which can then be used to display Gravatar (Globally Recognized Avatar) image available from gravatar.com.

I'll update this post later after the official announcement is made

Sorry to be a little cryptic earlier, but when someone writes to me and says, "Here's some information that I don't want you to talk about for awhile", I oblige. I was contacted by Google in regards to a method to make comment spam a thing of the past, or at the very least, ineffectual. Here is an excerpt from the Google blog post on "Preventing comment spam".

If you're a blogger (or a blog reader), you're painfully familiar with people who try to raise their own websites' search engine rankings by submitting linked blog comments like "Visit my discount pharmaceuticals site." This is called comment spam, we don't like it either, and we've been testing a new tag that blocks it. From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel="nofollow") on hyperlinks, those links won't get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn't a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it's just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists.

MSN Search and Yahoo! will also support this link attribute. It's great to see the search engines come together to support this attribute.

This is real cooperation as Dave Winer noted. It's such a simple way to discourage comment spammers as their links will no longer count towards increased visibility in search engine rankings.

I will be updating blojsom in the next few days to support this initiative via our plugin API. In addition, there are a number of comment and trackback moderation plugins for blojsom that enable you to decide which comments or trackbacks eventually get posted to your site.

For further reading: Dave Winer. Six Apart. CNet. eWeek.

Movies I saw this past weekend:

• The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
• Sideways
• Napoleon Dynamite
• Resident Evil: Apocalypse

What movies am I going to see next? Whatever movies I want ... GOSH!

I just checked into CVS the first implementation of the cross-post plugin for blojsom. Using category meta-data you can specify that posts to any category in your blog can be automatically cross-posted to anything that supports either the Blogger or metaWeblog APIs.

Undone (The Sweater Song) - Weezer

The falling price and diminutive size of iPods — including the Shuffle, which weighs less than an ounce and is smaller than a pack of gum — promotes the notion that they're disposable, said Mamta Khanna, program manager for Oakland, Calif.-based Center for Environmental Health.

"People think you can just trash these things," Khanna said. "No one's thinking about where they end up."

SCode Plugin is a Blojsom plugin to prevent comment spam by displaying an image with a random Security Code. The Security Code on the image will then be checked against the Security Code entered by the user.

Requires Blojsom 2.22 . Generates PNG image (smaller size). Incorrect SCode marks the comment as to be deleted. Allow the ability to add image engines, includes some sample ImageEngine which uses JCaptcha library to generate image.

Uh oh spaghetti-oh! It looks like Mark is back doing some coding for blojsom and he's whipped up a Weather Plugin. As I understand it, it parses data from the National Weather Service and makes an object available to your template where you can print out details on weather in your area. For example (screen capture from his site):

There are still lots of plugins or other goodies to be written for the blojsom developers contest.

Blogging is changing the way people communicate. Are you a blogger?

No. I think people overrate blogging. I think the overall phenomenon to me is Web pages. Blogs are just Web pages, a certain stylized form of Web page. Much of the blogging is driven by egotism.

I'm down on podcasts. I think that's ridiculous. Suddenly you're taking the information and making it completely inaccessible. You can't read it, and besides a podcast is nothing. It's streaming MP3s that's good, but no one can take credit for inventing a new term because streaming MP3s is simple and has been around for a while. Doing it through RSS enclosures is basically bad--to automatically download big files before hearing them. The whole thing about audio is that it has small enough bandwidth that you can stream. You just can't stream from an iPod because it doesn't have a network connection, yet. I'm excited about getting an iPod with 802.11 so I can stream to my AirPort Express without carrying my Mac around.

Download source code and/or updates or the Quickstart bundle. Changelog. Upgrading instructions.

Well, I continue the fine tradition of updating blojsom at least once a month. What about December? Ahhh well, I spent time with family and vacationing. There are a few interesting aspects to this release.

• Improved comment/trackback moderation: blojsom continues to be with the forefront of other blog software packages like MovableType or Wordpress that offer ways to moderate comments and trackbacks. In this version of blojsom, I've also added the ability for plugins which look at comments or trackbacks to have comments or trackbacks simply thrown away. This is how, for example, the math comment moderation plugin works. If comment moderation is enabled and the answer to the question is incorrect, the comment is simply thrown away. You can also use a combination of plugins to combat comment or trackback spam like using the SCode plugin in conjunction with the Open Proxy Moderation plugin. And you also have the ability to automatically disable comments or trackbacks after a certain number of days or throttle comments or trackbacks. There are other plugins in the works to make comment and trackback management easier.
• More administration console localizations: This release we added Brazilian Portuguese as a localization. That brings us up to English, German, Korean, Swedish, and Brazilian Portuguese.
• Template macros: Template macros are basically shorthand pieces you can use in your template to print out certain information or find out information about certain objects. I converted our default theme to use the macros. They're powerful and I'll be adding more to make template customization much easier.

Enjoy!

And don't forget to join the blojsom developer contest. Honest to goodness prizes available!

Now on for the naughty bits. Our changelog has all the links.

blojsom 2.22 (Codename: Cîroc) - Released January 8, 2005

Core

* Added ability to use http://your.host.com/blog/some/category/permalink.html style permalinks.
* Added LDAP authorization provider.
* Added methods on BlogEvent class to indicate if an event has been handled. This allows listeners to mark an item as handled to indicate to other listeners that they may not have to process the event.
* Deprecated load(Blog blog), save(Blog blog), and delete(Blog blog) methods on the BlogCategory object. Added methods that take BlogUser objects instead.
* Updated caching fetcher to handle blog entry events. This allows the cache to be updated on events such as entries being added, updated, or deleted be that through the web administration interface, XML-RPC, or the Atom API.

Localization

* Added Brazilian Portuguese localization for the administration console.

Plugins

* New Plugins
* Added Math Comment Moderation Plugin that requires users to answer a math question before they can leave a comment.
* Added Open Proxy Moderation Plugin to check if the requesting client is submitting a comment or trackback from a known open proxy.
* SCode Plugin available which helps to prevent comment spam by displaying an image with a random Security Code. The Security Code on the image will then be checked against the Security Code entered by the user.

* Added < and > buttons to Quicktags interface for administration console.
* Plugins like the Comment Moderation plugin or the Trackback Moderation plugin can now add a key, BLOJSOM_PLUGIN_COMMENT_METADATA_DESTROY, for the comment plugin, or BLOJSOM_PLUGIN_TRACKBACK_METADATA_DESTROY, for the trackback plugin, to the meta-data Map in the context. This map can be retrieved under the key, BLOJSOM_PLUGIN_COMMENT_METADATA, for the comment plugin and under the key BLOJSOM_PLUGIN_TRACKBACK_METADATA, for the trackback plugin. If the destroy key is set, the comment or trackback will not be saved.
* Added ignore regular expression support to the Moblog plugin to allow you to filter out text. This is useful in filtering out banner text used by some cellular phone providers.
* The Moblog plugin now allows you to use the plugin-moblog-store-provider configuration parameter in web.xml to support IMAP instead of POP3 for retrieving mail. The default store provider used if none is provided is POP3.
* Added an RSSEnclosure object to the metadata that gets populated on a BlogEntry if there is an associated enclosure picked up by the RSS Enclosure plugin. You can call the getUrl(), getLength(), and getType() methods on this object. This information may be useful if you want to add a link to an item's description field in your RSS 2.0 feed.

Templates

* Added Template Macros for use in your Velocity templates.

Themes

* Added Kubrick theme.
* Added Ocean theme.

Bugs Fixed

* JIRA

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Well, we'll see that worked just A-OK.

Swell, don't you agree? You can even switch between fixed/elastic layout.

Sorry ... I've been lax in posting an update on new sites I've come across using blojsom.

Singin The Doom Song All Day
Advisen Focus
Miles' Blog
Adam Kruszewski
Natalia BÄ…kowska
Blogging@PiPrograms
Hiberforum
Agylen Blog

Not on our "powered by sites" list? Let me know and I'll add your site.

After Simon posted an entry on deploying Pebble on JBoss 4.0 I figured I'd see if there were any gotchas in deploying blojsom under JBoss 4.0.

NOTE: I did this under JBoss 4.0.1 as well.

Good news is you can still go by the existing instructions to install blojsom on JBoss.

Bad news is that you're going to modify the Tomcat server.xml to enable proper UTF-8 support for proper internationalization handling. My guess is that you'd need to do this for other blog software packages as well.

Go into the /jboss-4.0.1/server/default/deploy/jbossweb-tomcat50.sar directory, open up the server.xml file and add URIEncoding="UTF-8" to the various <Connector ... /> elements that require internationalization support.

Example:

<!-- A HTTP/1.1 Connector on port 8080 -->
<Connector port="8080" address="${jboss.bind.address}"
maxThreads="150" minSpareThreads="25" maxSpareThreads="75"
enableLookups="false" redirectPort="8443" acceptCount="100"
connectionTimeout="20000" disableUploadTimeout="true" URIEncoding="UTF-8"/>

That's about it. Using the blojsom quickstart bundle, it's still basically download, deploy, and blojsom is running. That and the little extra UTF-8 bit. No big whoop.

42 Below. Smooth.

The website is funny as all hell. The Flashimation they've got on their site has a bar with 4 people sitting at it. Wait long enough and the girl at the far end of the bar (towards the back of your screen) falls off her barstool. If you've got your sound on, she hits the floor when you hear a loud THUWMP! That and the guy snags a smooch from the girl standing next to him.

Pravda. Pure.

What about Poland?

A record turnout for Commissioner elections netted 107 votes for me & only 7 for my challenger

Open proxy check plugin for comments and trackbacks. This plugin queries the Distributed Sender Blackhole List if a comment or trackback is submitted.

I'm now an Apple shareholder. How's that? One of the gifts my parents gave me this Christmas was stock in Apple.

I wonder why?