Otherwise Occupied - Drupal

Feeds changed to FeedBurner

gregh — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 22:28:19 -0600

I've implemented via redirect to the two signifcant feeds: the front page (/feed and /rss.xml) and my blog (/blogs/1/atom/feed). In actuality, there's usually little difference between my blog and the front page. Every post to my blog is promoted to the front page. However, this entry, which is a sitewide "story" is not a part of my blog.

Anyhow, for those who have been reading my feeds, if you experience any problems, please let me know. I'll probably be making some more changes in coming weeks; this was just the first step.

Other things I've got in mind are splitting my blog, going toward one blawg and one more personal/random stuff blog. Somewhat stupidly, the holdup on the first one has been coming up with a good name. Feel free to submit suggestions.

Akismet nabs its 100th spam

gregh — Sun, 28 Jan 2007 05:02:11 -0600

After trying a number of things to combat spam, a little over 3 months ago I installed Akismet, a free-for-non-commercial-use anti-spam service from Automattic, the people behind WordPress.com and WordPress.org. Of course, I don't use WordPress for this site; I use Drupal. No worries. The Automattic folks allow anyone to code to the API, and Markus Petrux of phpMiX.org has written a Drupal Akismet module.

As you can see from the counter in the lower right, in just over 3 months, Akismet has caught 100 spam comments. That seems to be a pretty good indicator that my site is not popular enough to be hit. I do run the Bad Behavior module, as well, which catches lots of comment spam before it gets to Akismet, rejecting it for petty little things like bad headers and stuff. My Akismet numbers might be higher, but I like that Referer spam is blocked by Bad Behavior.

Before Bad Behavior, the spam was much worse. But even with it, it was pretty bad. I used the old Spam module for Drupal, but it had pretty poor results. Then I shifted to captcha, but spammers got by it even when legit people couldn't.

Akismet has been wonderful. Nothing's slipped past, and nothing's been falsely accused of being spam. That's pretty good.

Drupal upgraded

gregh — Tue, 23 May 2006 03:10:32 -0500

I finally upgraded to Drupal 4.7. The site was bouncing around a bit, as I was making some changes to some of the hierarchy along the way. It's still a hideous mess, but at least it's a little bit manageable.

Right now, I'm mostly looking forward to posting right out of MarsEdit without an error every time. Until this, the process had been draft, post, refresh, edit, re-add categories, and re-send. Only then would content make it out. I was too lazy to track it all the way down. Mired down in the old xmlrpc.php, I eventually just decided I didn't care.

Next, I need to figure out how to dynamically add tags (Categories) from MarsEdit, so I can use it to freetag.

Oops, indeed.

gregh — Wed, 12 Apr 2006 11:51:15 -0500

I received a seemingly random email from Sam this morning, with a subject of "Oops" and an inline screenshot.

Last night, after linking here from a TWEN posting, I decided to eliminate the Organic Groups module from Drupal. Turns out that somehow disabled anonymous access to the site content. Odd.

Anyhow, I've re-enabled Organic Groups, even though I am not using it and don't trust it enough to use it, and the site seems to be back for anonymous readers (who constitute nearly all of my limited readership.)

Drupal, MarsEdit, and #039 (Updated)

gregh — Wed, 16 Nov 2005 23:43:17 -0600

I've been slow posting to the old blog of late, not in any small part to the switch to Drupal, which made life with MarsEdit... uncomfortable. Every time I posted and it resynced, all of the posts had their apostrophes translated to #039. When MarsEdit got this (and from what I've read, ecto, as well), it slapped it into the text as #039. If I edited and resubmitted, bang. #039 in the text. If I edited a post (which I do, sometimes repeatedly, as I fix them), I'd have to clear out all of those #039's.

Obviously, one workaround would have been to use no apostrophes in my writing. My workaround was to just use the web submission of blog entries, which I always found to be annoying. Can't do it working offline. No spell-checking. Generally, a pain.

What was the problem? In xmlrpc.inc, xmlrpc_value_get_xml() called Drupal's check_plain(), which in turn called the PHP builtin htmlspecialchars(). However, the Drupal check_plain() called with ENT_QUOTES translated all single quotes... to #039.

I replaced xmlrpc_value_get_xml()'s call to check_plain() with a call to htmlspecialchars() without ENT_QUOTES.

Problem solved. I imagine there must be a larger problem somewhere else, maybe in some shared library used by both MarsEdit and ecto? If I was more proactive, I'd log a bug with each (as was requested by ecto's author, the last time I mentioned my gripes.) But I'm, uh, otherwise occupied.

Update (18 November):
After having figured out the problem, I returned today to Drupal's search and searched for "ENT_QUOTES". And I found that for upcoming versions, it would appear my change is already in place.

Site converted to Drupal

gregh — Fri, 29 Jul 2005 05:47:14 -0500

I just flipped the switch on the site, so that it now runs Drupal. I had been running WordPress.

Why the change? Well, the principal reasons revolve around the features of Drupal and how I believe they can be used for my Law School Collective system, as well as for a little project I'm working on for BMWSportTouring.com. In addition, I tend to believe that it may well fill the roll at work we're currently looking at a wiki for... And I think it can do it in a more user-friendly, integrated way. In fact, there's even a person we've not entirely helped yet who I think could make use of the integrated service.

A replacement for a wiki? Well, principally, I'm looking at the collaborative book feature. We're primarily looking at a wiki to handle FAQ's at work. The collaborative book feature seems to take care of that, and it's in a much more natural form for users than a wiki is. We still get to track the changes, who made the changes, etc.

But we've also been talking about blog services. So, Drupal can subsume both most of the wiki functionality and handle the blogs, already configured to do so in a multi-user environment. Plus, it will happily hand us RSS feeds of every posting.

Then, there have been some who want message boards and notifications. Yup, it's in there.

I'll go into the BMWSportTouring.com stuff a bit later. This has run later than I anticipated.