bedeviled mojo slop

Miles writes in ...

I've successfully got Blojsom 3.0 working with PostgreSQL. Why
bother, you might ask. Well, aside from me being a nutbush wide-eyed
PostgreSQL zealot, the more standardised SQL of PostgreSQL should
make it easier to port Blojsom to other database back-ends. Once we
deploy for real, we'd use PostgreSQL or Microsoft SQL Server (mainly
because we have pre-existing clusters of these, so it would be a
pretty resilient solution).

So, I need to do a few things.

1. The instructions for creating the database connection user should only have privileges for the blojsom tables.
2. The database loader bean needs to have an initialization property for allowing customized behavior per database to detect, "Do the blojsom tables exist?"
3. is a reserved keyword in PostgreSQL and ANSI SQL and so that table will be renamed to DBUser.

And finally ...

I was impressed how easy this all was. Excellent work!

Well, that's good to hear. I'll get the blojsom 3.0 wiki updated with instructions and scripts shortly.

Technorati Tags: blojsom postgresql

New wallet.

Technorati Tags: j.fold

This blog is now running on blojsom 3.0. I've got a couple more template tweaks from the old template to move over, a change to make to preserve the old URLs, and to get back the responses for older entries.

But for the most part I simply exported the old blog in a feed, imported the blog using the feed import plugin, and that was it. I did screw up the initial export and forgot to include the tags that specified whether or not the entry allowed comments, trackbacks, or pingbacks. Oh well, mass update to those columns should be easy.

Dogfood never tasted so good!

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Roughly 2 minutes to import 1583 entries.

Almost ready to make the switch to blojsom 3.0!

Oh man, what about this entry? DOH!

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For the blojsom 3.0 import functionality, I'm using the ROME library. I've been augmenting the syndication feeds to allow for blojsom-specific tags on items to specify things like author, whether or not comments/trackbacks/pingbacks were allowed on the original entry, etc...

All of this took about 10 minutes. There's a good tutorial on writing sample modules for parsing or generation. Works as advertised!

I'll also be making available a template for people to use to import all of their existing entries from their blosjom 2.x install to their blojsom 3.x install. It'll have all the tags all done up right proper.

Technorati Tags: blojsom ROME

RE: Migrating from Blojsom to Pebble

Seems like a lot of work when you probably could've added a new template and flavor to blojsom, template: pebble.vm, flavor: export. All you'd need in the pebble.vm would be the proper tags for the pebble XML blog data format. Then you'd just have blojsom display all entries and use ?flavor=export on your blog URL and save the resulting page to disk. Done.

I'd seen a little bit of traffic out there related to bloggers installing and using Pebble, and since the only blogs I read are those of other developers, I thought there might be something to it. Not only did Pebble install and configure like a dream (1 hour to determine that I was ahead of the published docs, as opposed to 2 days with Blojsom's up-to-date docs), but I thought it looked a lot nicer out of the box. So, I thought I'd try the switch.

I guess there are always edge cases. I've only had a few people say the blojsom Quickstart bundle didn't work as advertised, i.e. setup in less than 5 minutes.

Oh well. Sorry it didn't work out.

P.S. - blojsom 3.0 M1 is available.

Technorati Tags: pebble blojsom

Black Hole Sun - Soundgarden

If you happen to be in New York City, drop by the National Arts Club. Some interesting facts about the National Arts Club.

The National Arts Club was founded in 1898 by Charles de Kay. Charles de Kay was the literary and art critic for The New York Times for 18 years.
The National Arts Club admitted women on a full and equal basis from its inception.
The Club's membership has included three presidents.

The Hudson Valley Art Association's member show at the National Arts Club runs through May 7th, 2006. The gallery is open M-F, 10 AM - 5 PM.

The painting, "Sunflowers In Crimson Vase" usually hangs in the dining room downstairs, but is now in the HVAA show.

It was painted last year by a good friend, Christopher Pierce.

If you happen to be in San Francisco, Chris is represented by the John Pence Gallery.

Technorati Tags: national arts club christopher pierce john pence gallery

If you're using the LDAP authorization provider in blojsom and you've wanted LDAP over SSL support, well ... patch applied. I made the changes to both the 2.31 and 3.0 branches.

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About a month ago I discussed blojsom 3.0.

The first milestone for blojsom 3.0 is available for download. As far as documentation, there's a home for blojsom 3.0 on the wiki and some notes on installation. Although this is a milestone release for blojsom 3.0, I consider it appropriate for new installations of blojsom.

I would've declared this as blojsom 3.0 final, but I I'd like to have the 2.x to 3.0 conversion and import utilities in the 3.0 release.

My plan is to have one or two more milestone releases, each with a 2-week develop/test/release cycle. That means you can expect blojsom 3.0 final on or around June 1, 2006.

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Sugar We're Goin Down - Fall Out Boy

New chair.

I just pulled a few random screenshots from portions of the blojsom 3.0 administration interface. Click each image for the mo' fatter version.

I've been moving to screens where the configured items are presented first with links to actions for those items. And then there's the quick link to add a new item. It's less cluttered I guess. Sometimes I wonder what is running through my head when I'm thinking, "Oh, a great name for a category would be shallots. Because, well, that's not a limiting name in any way."

Manage entries by paging through your entries or lookup by date or search term.

Managing responses in bulk is a matter of a clicking a link to select or un-select all or selecting an item individually to be deleted or approved. The edit screen for an individual entry uses AJAX to allow you to manage responses.

Don't upload bad stuff. Probably I'll change this later to include extensions rather than types.

More of the same interface as described above.

In some UIs I've been experimenting with drag and drop where you'd drag around the order of plugins to be executed for a given flavor. And that's cool. For the first iteration of blojsom 3.0 I'm sticking with the text field.

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Click here to see more Javascript nerdery in action in blojsom 3.0. Script.aculo.us and prototype are good.

I contemplated adding pulsate around the response when you click a link, but that was annoying. The text changes and that's about all you need, IMO, to know that you've marked a response as approved/unapproved or as spam/not spam. The marking responses as spam/not spam means we have a few new events for comments, trackbacks, and pingbacks to submit back to Akismet from the Akismet Moderation Plugin.

Technorati Tags: blojsom script.aculo.us prototype akismet

Before I head out and drink some wine, I figured I'd share a movie of response management for blojsom 3.0 that I whipped up using 1 line of script.aculo.us. My thought was that when you click the "Delete" button on a response, it just drops out from the list. It's not new. I think I've seen it done in Typo. You could also of course do this right from the entry page itself if say you were logged in, but that's not implemented currently.

Click here to see it in action.

Other things I was thinking about ... What if "approved" responses were marked with a light green background on the screen? What if "unapproved", but not "spam" responses were marked with a light yellow background on the screen? What if "spam" responses were marked with a light red background on the screen? Maybe they could be ordered like a traffic light so the red responses are shown on top, followed by the yellow, followed by the green? Too US centric? Just thinking out loud here.

Technorati Tags: blojsom script.aculo.us

Well, Apple Store called this AM and told me to come pick up the sick iMac. It was now better.

WRONG!

I boot the machine and start working and go to backup my data just in case.

CRASH!

I rebooted a few times and even got the 3 bells sound on startup telling me that there was no RAM present. WOW! The iMac was pretty fucked I thought.

Back to the Apple store ... wherein the iMac snubs me and works without failure and I'm left looking like an idiot.

But I played it smart the second time I brought it home and caught photographic evidence of the iMac meltdown as shown hm'yah.

And as illustrated over h'yah.

BUSTED! You are SOOOOOOOOOOO busted iMac!

Yeah, the graphics are very pretty and very NIN-esque, but the machine was obviously still sick. It's like when you're a kid and you take antibiotics for the first time and you throw up even more because you're actually allergic to penicillin and then they put you on amoxycillin instead and you get better.

And that's where we're at ... Apple is now replacing my logic board a 2nd time. They're out a total of roughly $2000 and I'm out a machine for another day or so.

The work authorization lists the following:

STEPS TO REPRODUCE: turn on - use

Oh, that is awesome

Moral of this continuing story ... BUY APPLECARE!

Basically what's in CVS is blojsom 3.0. However, my iMac is sick and so I'm working on a Powerbook G4 800 MHz. Eeeegads! It's slow. And although developer CVS at SourceForge is working, it still seems there are a few kinks they need to work out. Once my iMac is back, I'll get a 3.0 release candidate or whatever out on SourceForge.

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Coming to you live from the trusty Powerbook G4 800 MHz.

My iMac is sick ... again. It's unfortunate, but I've got AppleCare so no worries here.

The genius at the Apple store went right to ordering a new logic board. I hit her up with details about all the configurations they were going to try and detailed information from the system log. I'd love it if Apple would allow me to create a ticket online when I'm bringing my hardware into the Apple store with log snippets, screen captures, and other supporting information. I want to help and get my hardware working ASAP and if that information is useful to the technician, that's great.

The problem? Well, the iMac would drop the ethernet adapter maybe 5 minutes after starting. It seemed to cycle the ethernet adapter up and down, but it was never able to retrieve another IP address after the initial drop. It also seemed to be dropping my Lacie firewire disk that I use for backup. That was unfortunate because I wasn't able to backup the machine before sending it in for repair.

And if you're purchasing Apple hardware, get the AppleCare! The bill for the logic board and service time without it would've been close to $1000. Scary.

Seattle was a hoot. 94 Stewart is a fine restaurant.

The geek bowling dinner was intimate. We didn't actually bowl, but we did play a few games of pool after dinner. Part of that was due to the fact that we had an 8 PM lane reservation and the other folks got there just about 8 PM. The other part was due to the fact that someone had a heart attack in the downstairs lanes and unfortunately passed away.

I did finally get to meet Jay Fienberg and his wife Anastasia. Nathan attended, but I already knew him. We mostly talked about non-techie stuff which was great. Although, we did dish about the Werner/Scoble exchange at Amazon's Fishbowl talk. Mostly I was just happy that I sunk the 8 ball in the pocket I had picked for our last game.

Good times ... good times.

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I've added the script.aculo.us library to blojsom for blojsom 3.0. Right now I've just been messing around with the visual effects it provides. I'll get to the AJAX interactions sooner rather than later. Here's the fade technique being applied to the status message output. I'd love better documentation, but whatever ...

Also, I haven't been neglecting CVS, but the SourceForge CVS developer server had a meltdown.

Technorati Tags: script.aculo.us blojsom