Xarg blog Archive

The new openacs.org site has been launched. There are definitely some glitches and some rough edges but having the site running on the current code will mean that things both get fixed much quicker and are tested much more thoroughly (at least the packages that show up on the site). One of the good things about ACS was that photo.net and later arsdigita.com both used it which meant that if there were serious problems in the code they got picked up and fixed quite quickly. Now we finally have that with OpenACS.

I tried out Radio Userland. I like how it all hangs together. It does not do that much but what it does do, it does well. I especially like the News Aggregator. The software and a year's worth of hosting seems like a pretty good deal for $40.

Next on my list to try is Movable Type. I am scared that all that all that perl might hurt my brain.

Ideally what I want to do is set up a weblogs.openacs.org so that we (the openacs.org community) would have a better means of coordinating ideas, proposals, and ongoing projects. I would also like to make it a platform where we could experiment with collaborative filtering, advogato style trust metrics and such. First thing to do though is get the weblog and aggregation tools together to support it.

It's amazing how trying to use your own software gets you to focus on the details. I made all the photo album package work the way I thought I would want it to but then after uploading a couple hundred photos I realized there were real shortcomings in the UI. Before actually using it (but after fairly exhaustive testing) I would have sworn it was actually pretty usable. Now I know better. Some examples of things I ran into:

• When you bulk edit a page it sends you back to the page you just edited when usually I want to go to the next page.
• It does rotations in the background and because it sends the page with sizes you sometimes get the html out of sync with the thumbnail. I have rotated several images twice because I was not paying attention.
• Long upload times means it is very easy to accidentally interupt an upload in progress (this last one I don't know how to fix).

I find reading server logs relaxing and entertaining. Besides the infinite number of IIS exploits that turn up in the logs there can be other signs evil about. Two entries I noticed recently are illustrative of what you can find if you pay a little bit of attention...

134.157.24.10 - - [13/Oct/2002:12:08:01 -0400] 
    "POST /cgi-bin/formmail.pl HTTP/1.0" 404 549 "http://j3ff.com" 
    "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98; Win 9x 4.90)  
     via proxy gateway  CERN-HTTPD/3.0 libwww/2.17"

Here is someone trying to send spam via a (non-existent in my case) buggy form mail script. The interesting bit is that they have trawled the whois records to pick out the fact that I own j3ff.com as well as xarg.net (presumably because people trying to prevent spamular abuse of their buggy script typically check referrers).

This one, while not really as abusive as the first example is still still spam (although in this case it is spamming the weblog community).

207.253.71.48 - - [24/Oct/2002:00:01:50 -0400] 
    "GET /blog/ HTTP/1.1" 200 19529 "http://referrer.mastodonte.com" 
    "Mastodonte Referrer Advertising"

If you follow the referrer here you find a site that will add "your URL as a referrer in the logs of thousands of weblogs" all for a mere CAN$ 1,500. I guess it is the inevitable result of backlinking and Google's ranking algorithm - another negative externality to fight. Tragic...

I put up my modified version of the photo-album package. I am currently suffering the pain of the A in ADSL as I try to copy about 3GB of photos up to the server. I guess 24 hours is really not that bad...

Soon there will be more family photos than you can shake a stick at. Aunts, Uncles, and Grandparents will no longer be able to pester me about getting copies of all those digital photographs I took :)

I am learning about RDF and RSS which I had never paid much attention to before. I downloaded the dmoz directory in RDF to play with. I think the catagorization and link datasets would make good test data for OpenACS (and PostgreSQL for that matter). Ben Adida pointed me at the Redland RDF parser which conveniently already has a Tcl Binding.

Unfortunately, most of the RSS feeds are not very clean so a strict parser might not really work for what I really want to do (which is build an aggregation service to pull together all the different OpenACS development sites bug trackers, blogs, etc). Since we would be writing the code to generate the RDF data we could just make sure we do it right and just use a strict parser. On the other hand I could see getting feeds from other sources that were not so clean. It's a common problem and it looks like people are thinking about how to attack it.

I liked the Mozilla RDF and XUL Bugzilla example.

I posted the two articles I had been working on How I built this site and My AOLServer has fallen and can't get up so now there is something under writing. Yay. Now I need to get static pages working and add the photo-album module and things will be most of the way there (or at least there will be something under all the tabs).

Well, the rss problem was that rss is not set up properly unless you use the subscr-ae page passing it the secrit impl_id and context to register it with the rss gen service. As for notifications it looks like if you don't first submit as a draft and then publish the notification (and weblog.com ping) don't happen. Well, gradually all this will get ironed out and it will all just work smoothly. Oh, there was also a bug with the way the rss was generated that made blog entries with strings and quotes break the rss generation as well.

neither work right out of the box. It's not clear what the problem is although I think in both cases it is that the default parameters are bad (openacs.org as the sender domain and no defaults for rss files).

I am working on merging the sloanspace changes into dotLRN. Of course, there are conflicts with the work that both Collaboraid and OpenForce have done and not committed. I guess I view the existence of conflicts as a good thing since it means the code is changing.

I rock. Now I am like my hero Lars.