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Archive for the ‘Projects’ Category

Converted to WordPress

30 Sep

So I converted to WordPress.

I wrote a conversion script to ease the pain of converting all my data from Serendipity, no images survived though – I could hack it, but I can’t really be arsed.

Why WordPress? Well, it does the job and it has a nice administration and authoring system. Codewise I’m not at all happy with the abuse of extract(), but I can learn to live with it.

Why not Serendipity? Well, to be honest, I like how wordpress feels, it feels like a complete product and it’s still in very active development. I have nothing against Serendipity, but I’m confident WordPress is the right tool for the job I need done at this time.

 
 

What’s up?

09 Jun

So I wonder if anyone is still reading this blog, or are even remotely interested in my words of wisdom.
In any case for the one reader who ponders my absence, I will summarize what I have been doing since my last post.

Basically I’ve been working as always. Currently I manage the daily operation of UnoEuro. My job is mainly to reply to support tickets and make sure the servers are running smoothly. As always I still manage the Linux servers at Wannafind, along with my co-worker, and write the occasional internal scripting .
I can’t really talk about it much, since the webhosting industry in Denmark is fused with accusations and fingerpointing, if someone reads something from a hosting provider, they instantly try to twist words and ignite flames, kindda sad, otherwise I would probably post more about the subject.

I also still have my small coding projects, though my last big PHP project was coding Unoeuro, it was a lot of fun and took me 2 months working day and night – Winamp running in the background and Dreamweaver in the foreground – It’s funny how some songs now instantly remind me of those months of coding, it’s like they are burned in to my memory.

In my spare time? Well I got hooked by that damn World of Warcraft, what can you do? It’s like a drug (and as you will see in a minute, I love it).

I currently have two characters, both Paladins. The first Paladin is level 60 and on the PVP server Al’Akir, I basically never play that Paladin, since I got bored of world PVP and the server sucked in terms community.
My other Paladin is also level 60 and located on the PVE server Kul Tiras, he’s currently in an end-game guild which is struggling with C’thun phase 2, he has full Lawbringer (Tier 1), Judgement (Tier 2) and currently 58% through rank 13 in the PVP ranking system. Both Paladins are named Saroz, a name I came up with on the character creation screen.
I’m an officer in the guild and i manage the Website, Forum, DKP system and the Ventrillo server. This is my first game where I’ve talked to my fellow players through voice communication, and it’s really been a blast to get to learn so many new people from all over Europe, let’s just say I’ve come to learn a few nasty greek words.
The game, and indeed the guild, has its ups and downs, unlike anything I’ve ever experienced before in a game, this game is something you put your heart in to, something you prioritise because you got 40+ other players counting on your presence for raids.
I’m moving to a new apartment next month, which I am really looking forward to and should provide a nice change of scenery.

Serendipity? After I started playing World of Warcraft I sort of gave up on Serendipity. I was never comfortable with the community to be honest, I guess I have my own way of doing things and every time I tried to move the project in the direction I wanted it, I got hit by a brick wall of objections.
To be honest, Serendipity is like a huge patchwork, it’s based on a codebase and a concept that was created more than 5 years ago, and since then we’ve tried different ways of patching that framework up, I guess this is where we found our different ways of approaching that problem. We tried patching it up section by section, redesigning one part of the code and then the next, however as you may have guessed, the result is just another patchwork, it never really solved the root of the problem. I can see much of my code still lives, so that’s kind of fun.

I installed WordPress the other day and noticed it didn’t have a Serendipity importer, so I started coding one and immediately found a HUGE annoyance.. Who the HELL thought it was a good idea to absolutely abuse extract()? I got variables all over the place which I have NO idea where originates *golfclap*

Anyway, enough ranting, I’ll try and post more about less in the future :)

 

New imports for Serendipity

14 Feb

Today Garvin committed lots of new import-modules for Serendipity. So if you’ve wanted to try out Serendipity, but didn’t want to loose your old entries, now is a good time to convert :)

The following import-modules are currently bundled:
– WordPress 1.2
– MovableType
– Nucleus
– Textpattern 1.0rc1
– pMachine Pro 2.4
– boastMachine 3.0
– b2Evolution
– sunlog .04.4
– geeklog 1.3.11

The new importers are included in tomorrows snapshot, any feedback can be provided in our forums.

 
 

Supersized Serendipity hosting in beta

14 Feb

Jannis Hermanns has been working hard on creating a Serendipity hosting project, entitled Supersized.

It’s now in beta, so go check it out if you want a quick and easy way to get a great blog setup :)

 
 

Trackback spam hits

01 Feb

Stupid spam companies have started using trackback spam.

I got about 120 trackbacks with links to a casino. All trackbacks were auto-moderated by the spamblock plugin which meant they weren’t displayed to any users. So all-in-all it didn’t really do anything, becides forcing me to clean up.

Deleting them through the comment manager took less than 30 seconds, using the mass-delete feature.

I personally don’t really mind, but we’ll see if we can figure out a way to detect these bastards, but it’s hard when you can’t subject them to captcha approval.

Kris and Sebastian has more dirt

 
 

GoDaddy founder uses Serendipity

26 Jan

Ben Ramsey (WordPress fan, be advised) noticed that the founder of GoDaddy.com (huge domain registrar), Bob Parsons, is using Serendipity.

Sweet :)

 
 

Open letter to Google

20 Jan

The following is an open letter from Serendipity to google.com, regarding their announcement of the ‘nofollow’ tag.

Dear Google,

In response to your announcement of the ‘nofollow’ tag, we – as a weblog software project – feel we must voice our thoughts on this.

While many weblog projects have been eager to announce their full support of your initiative, we believe the ‘nofollow’ tag only provides a false sense of ‘security’ to the weblog owner, and indeed punishes legitimate links in comments posted by trustworthy commenting users. We feel the solution to the comment spam problem lies not with Google, but in the weblog software itself, by the means of antispam measures to prevent spam in the first place. After all, the intention of comment spam is not always to just gain higher rank on Google, but to also distribute links for visitors of the weblog to see.

We therefore cannot openly support this new tag, but feel it is up to the individual blog owner to decide whether or not he wishes to implement it. We will however create a plugin that attach the tag to links within comments, sidebars and links to the commentators website. This will enable blog authors whom want to support the ‘nofollow’ tag, to do so. This plugin will be downloadable from our website.

Thank you for your effort.

Regards

Tom Sommer, on behalf of The Serendipity Development Team

- Link to announcement on s9y.org
- The discussion on our mailing list

 
 

Kubrick for Serendipity

05 Jan

I decided to port the popular, and totally awesome, Kubrick theme to Serendipity.

Ever since I first saw Kubrick I’ve been wanting to do this, and now that Serendipity v0.8 uses Smarty templating, I finally had a chance to do it :)

It was very easy to conform Serendipity to use the same HTML as Kubrick does. It still needs some minor tweaking, but the result is really great and I’m very happy with it.

Let’s see if I can get this sucker bundled :)

 
 

Depending on JavaScript

26 Dec

Some time ago Sebastian Nohn started removing some JavaScript dependencies in Serendipity 0.8. This in itself is a welcomed action and I totally support it as long as it does not lower the functionality of the product.

I myself have been doing a lot of work on the 0.8 administration, changing its overall design and functionality. So when I noticed that we, in some places, used these new fake buttons (as I call them) and in some places did not, I – from a graphical point of view – became very frustrated. I think it sends a wrong and bad signal to the end users. I’d personally think the developers was complete morons if they used fake buttons 4 out of 20 places, and thought they could fool me into thinking they were normal input buttons. It would come off as cheap.

Nohn seems to be rather mad at me for openly questioning his changes (his blog is in German, so I’m just guessing). My problem is that while removing JavaScript dependencies in itself is good for usability, the method in which it was done, only decreases it.

My questions are… why not:
1) Do it everywhere. Removing JavaScript dependencies 2 out of 10 places doesn’t really do much for the overall usability.
2) Do it with thought. Why not try to come up with a solution that also serves the design aspect, rather than trying to fool the user with fake CSS buttons?

So Sebastian, my problem is not with your idea of removing JavaScript dependencies, just the method used to achieve it.

PS. Sebastian also comments on other things in his article, but I don’t read German – I’ll be happy to comment if someone translates it.

 
 

SourceForge CVS takes my developer urge away

29 Nov

Since Serendipity uses SourceForge, we naturally also use the SourceForge CVS services. The problem is that CVS is painfully slow 90% of the time, and having to wait 7 min. for a “cvs diff -u” is unacceptable. The anonymous CVS has a 24 hour lag. So changes committed now, will only be available to the public 24 hours later, again this is unacceptable.

I am so sick of SourceForge CVS, I’ve had times when I simply stopped coding because the waiting literally took my motivation away.

I mean, SourceForge can have all the mirrors they want, but if none of the projects can develop anything – then why even bother?

We’ve considered moving to BerliOS, and while I initially opposed this, I am starting to have my share of doubts. A super fast CVS server would be really.. really nice.