wafblog v3.0

Ok, I am slowly, but surely, hacksing my way through bBlog. I do rather like this blogging/CMS tool. It’s fairly easy to use and most of the stuff is straight-forward. It uses the Smarty template engine and seems to make a lot of things simpler. At the same time, there’s lots that doesn’t work out of the box.

So far, I have fixed:
- menu bar (which does away with the navi section of the sidebar so that’s heaps good)
- side bar (yeay for icons and general linkage!)

Stuff I’ve half-fixed:
- comments (It’s very brute-ish. Comments containing the words poker, casino and viagra are currently blocked. But! I did manage to find this entry about adding spam protection, so I might try implementing it later)
- the calendar (I removed those stupid arrows that DON’T WORK. I think that they *should* work – but I’m fairly sure it’s my archives.php that’s causing the trouble)
- archives (it shows by month now on the sidebar but no in the actual archives page – again I think it’s the php page)

Things to work on:
- more content for sidebar
- the rss feed (I have no idea what to do about that actually o_O)
- the “Read More” plugin (essentially the same as an LJ cut)
- PhotoBlog (apparently there was a plugin in-the-making but doesn’t seem to have been released and I haven’t had time to look into it)

The main thing holding me back is a general lack of PHP knowledge. I’ve done ASP and some VBScript, but quite frankly it seems completely different to PHP. I’m not sure if it’s just cos I’m looking straight at the PHP files and haven’t properly sat down to understand the syntax but generally languages shouldn’t be too hard to learn. Hrm. I’m not sure if there’s anything else I’d really want to do with my blog. I won’t really have time to look into these things until uni finishes (two more months!) but even then I’m likely to lose interest and just makedo with what I’m using. It’s shame – bBlog seems like a great blogging tool but it seems that all development on it has stopped.

I’ll leave you with something that all programmers can relate to.

So people, do you really think Joe’s blog has much more influence than you think? I mean really – as someone who blogs, I don’t really think being extremely vocal on my site is going to do much. At the same time, I suppose if you take something like LiveJournal and think about how easy it is to make a community, some very strongly-worded icons and the like, then yeah… maybe bloggers are making an influence. But a few hundred people voicing their concerns about TV programs isn’t really going to make a difference is it? If it was why are we still watching reality TV? Not sure, I suppose I should be thankful that bloggers are seen as being ‘influential’, but if that voice is not being used for something meaningful, then really I think it’s just a waste.

In other news, I have gotten nowhere with my thesis lately. In fact, I pretty much haven’t started on that JSP. *smacks head*. What the fuck am I doing with my time? I have no idea – I’m slowly, slowly, slowly wasting away on LJ, Yahoo!Groups, and blogs. o_O Actually, it feels kind of pathetic. I really need to get out more but I’m too lazy to get off my arse really.

More importantly, I have a midsemester exam for Computer Engineering this Friday. It is somewhat annoying that this subject has the same name as my degree, because people ask me what subjects I’m doing and I’ll be like “Computer Engineering” and they look at me funny. It’s the subject dammit!!!! It’s a somewhat fun subject, but usually involves a lot of facepalming because my partner and I think too in-depth. We always forget that we’re not really dealing with the ‘circuit’ itself, moreso the ‘system’ and how it fits together. Anyways, it was cool to make the little LCD thing light up. I really would like to make a shift-adder or something though. I suppose writing words to the LCD is more cool or at least, the results are more… noticeable. I must start studying for this very soon. There’s no recommended text, just the two reading pack thingies we bought for the course. So tomorrow will be full on JSP *crosses fingers, closes all web-browsers not JSP related* and then Wednesday will be more JSP and possibly some VHDL. Wish me luck?