Will's blog

purpose: Will Kahn-Greene's blog of Python, Linux, random content, PyBlosxom, Miro, and other projects mixed in there ad hoc, half-baked, and with a twist of lemon

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Fri, 13 Aug 2010

Comments have been broken

Rick kindly pointed out that comments on my blog were broken. Totally my fault--I've been working on PyBlosxom on and off and a couple of weeks ago I updated my blog to use the latest version of PyBlosxom in git master and didn't grab the latest comments plugin.

Comments were getting into the moderator queue (I moderate all comments), but when the comments plugin went to send me a notification email, it'd die.

They're working again.

[ tags: blog | category: /site | Permalink | 0 comments ]

Mon, 21 Dec 2009

Dealing with comment spam

Someone spammed my blog with 400+ comments for some shoes site. Took me less than 2 minutes to skim the emails, see the pattern, and then remove all the spam from my comments moderator queue. This sort of thing is the big strength of PyBlosxom.

I have my blog set up to store comments as individual text files in a comments/ directory. All comments have to be approved before they make it to the site. Approved comments end in .cmt and comments in the moderator queue end in .cmt-. Additionally, comments that contain one of a series of blacklisted words are rejected automatically. Any time someone posts a comment, I get an email.

It took me a minute to skim my 400+ emails and notice they're all kind of the same, 10 seconds to update the blacklist so that I won't get any additional comments like this in the future, and 10 seconds to remove all the spam from the queue with: 

   for mem in `grep -rl spamwordhere *`; do rm $mem; done

That was it--spam gone in less than 2 minutes. Took longer to write the blog post about it.

[ tags: blog, pyblosxom | category: /site | Permalink | 1 comments ]

Wed, 23 Sep 2009

Top 100 blogs?

Got a comment on a post about a conference call today that I'm a "top 100 blog" in Python. I'm not sure what the selection criteria was, but it looked legit-ish. Added their seal and link to the sidebar for now.

[ tags: blog | category: /site | Permalink | 0 comments ]

Sat, 13 Jun 2009

Moved Miro stuff over

I work at Participatory Culture Foundation and I have a work blog there that I use primarily for blogging about things related to PCF, Miro development, Miro-related development and other things of that ilk. It's on a WordPress system.

I decided after a while that having two blogs sucked. Also, I don't like Wordpress. Also also, I was getting crazy amounts of comment spam on my work blog.

As such, I did a couple of pushes to finish up PyBlosxom 1.5 enough so that I could write a tags plugin that I like so that I could migrate. Then I wrote a Wordpress to PyBlosxom migration script and the result is that I'm now blogging here for all Miro related things. Since it's easier to blog here, I'll probably be talking more about Miro-land. w00t!

[ tags: blog, miro | category: /site | Permalink | 0 comments ]

Fri, 05 Jun 2009

Tags

I spent a few hours throwing together a new tags plugin that makes use of the new commandline features of code in PyBlosxom trunk (which will be PyBlosxom 1.5). Then I spent a while adding tags to all my entries.

I'm still mulling over my choice of tags, but I imagine I'll hone it into a set I'm happy with over time.

Also, I used :: as a tag separator, but I think I'd recommend something that doesn't require a shift key to enter. Perhaps ;; or //.

Tag information is stored in two dicts that are pickled and thrown in a file. It seems to be pretty fast to load for my blog (~500 entries). I picked pickle because it was easy, but if it turns out to be a problem, I'd be game for other storage formats.

I've been waiting for tags support before I did more blogging. Now that I've got tags support, I plan to move my work blog here. That'll make things easier and get me off WordPress.

[ tags: blog, dev, pyblosxom, python | category: /site | Permalink | 3 comments ]

Tue, 03 Jul 2007

Playing with category feeds

It occurred to me that adding a link to category feeds was pretty trivial, so I figured I'd give it a try. It's a bit cluttered to look at (I'm talking about the Categories section on the right hand side there), but ... it's functional.

In case anyone was wondering what my category properties looked like, they're like this: 

# category plugin properties
py["category_start"] = ""
py["category_begin"] = ""
py["category_item"] = r'%(indent)s<a href="%(base_url)s/' + \
   r'%(fullcategory_urlencoded)sindex.%(flavour)s">%(category)s</a>' + \
   r' [<a href="%(base_url)s/%(fullcategory_urlencoded)sindex.xml">atom</a>]' + \
   r' (%(count)d)<br />'
py["category_end"] = ""
py["category_finish"] = ""
[ tags: blog, pyblosxom | category: /site | Permalink | 0 comments ]

Sun, 15 May 2005

My PyBlosxom setup (5/15/2005)

I figured I'd take some time to share my PyBlosxom setup. As of this writing, I'm running PyBlosxom under Python 2.3.4 on Debian with Apache 1.3.33. I'm running PyBlosxom 1.2 (with some minor adjustments). I have the following plugins:

  • booklist - displays a list of books that I'm reading
  • comments
  • wbgcomment_blacklist - rejects comments that have certain blacklisted terms in them (which has the minor nuissance that no one can talk about Texas Hold'em on here)
  • conditionalhttp - returns a 304 if the content hasn't been modified
  • filter - filters out CVS and other directories from my blog
  • gecko - tells people to use Firefox at the top if they aren't already doing so
  • plugininfo - lists the plugins that I'm using
  • pycategories - lists the categories in a hierarchy
  • pyfilenamemtime - allows me to set the mtime of the blog entry in the file name
  • pyinclude - allows me to include files with python scriptlets in the head and foot templates
  • pystaticfile - (poorly named) allows "static" content on my site but renders it in the existing template structure
  • readmore - allows me to break up my entries into a summary and extended section (I don't think I ever use this)
  • rss2renderer - builds the RSS 2.0 feed
  • tipsparser - parses tips files
  • title - urlencodes the title of a blog entry and tosses it in $urlencodedtitle (which is better for Google Links)
  • wbgamazon - builds Amazon links
  • wbgarchives - builds archive pages for entire years
  • wbgdebug - allows me to look at the debug output of my blog by tossing debug=yes in the querystring
  • wbggrep - my incredibly hacked "search" engine
  • wbgpager - builds paging navigation when there are more entries to display than I want to display at one time
  • wbgrecent - summarizes recent activity on my blog

I write most of my entries using vi or emacs and for the most part I write them in HTML.

There was a time where I wrote blog entries on whatever was in my head to build content and thus test PyBlosxom. Recently, I've been doing development summaries and writing about life changes. I think a good portion of my blog entries talk about how I don't have much free time.

I have no idea who my audience is or what they look for here.

[ tags: blog, pyblosxom | category: /site | Permalink | 1 comments ]

Sun, 15 Aug 2004

No more calendar

I'm going to take some time to slim down my site and make bits of it easier to use. Then I'll package up the templates I use and make them available for other PyBlosxom users. I'm curious to see how long that takes and how much effort is involved.

[ tags: blog, pyblosxom | category: /site | Permalink | 1 comments ]

Fri, 25 Jul 2003

Some more minor adjustments

A couple of friends pointed out to me my META tag to refresh from /~willg/ to /~willg/blog/ was borked and while it worked fine in Mozilla and derivatives (which are the only browsers I use), it didn't work at all in Internet Explorer. All fixed now though.

For future reference, the "good code" is like this: 

   <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; URL=http://bluesock.org/~willg/blog/">
[ tags: blog, pyblosxom | category: /site | Permalink | 0 comments ]

Sun, 20 Jul 2003

Minor adjustments to my blog

First off, it's now "http://www.bluesock.org/~willg/blog/". I followed Rael's directions and implemented the mod_rewrite adjustments. That worked super. Then it created some mild issues that I'm sorting out now. Namely, I have all kinds of content in different formats: html, shtml, php, and now pyblosxom entries. So I'm going to do a massive normalization of all the content and get rid of the stuff I don't update ever. Getting there.

Anyhow, so my point is that my entire site is now in a state of flux as it gets re-absorbed into more of a blog with a slight amount of static content.

[ tags: blog, pyblosxom | category: /site | Permalink | 0 comments ]
pyblosxom::1.5rc2 20100803

All contents Copyright 1996 to 2010 Will Guaraldi Kahn-Greene.

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