wafblog v3.0

I’m contemplating changing blogging software. That’s right. After touting bBlog as being awesome and blah blah, tweaking little things and trying to make it all nice and blah… I’ve decided that I want something different. bBlog is nice, and it’s easy to use, it’s simple and all that. But, the comment spam is driving me up the wall. I like the idea of having tags rather than sections and I want an easy way to manage images in my posts rather than to have to remember what number I’ve uploaded.

So, the choices? Well, I’m not sure really. I found this rather useful breakdown of the different blogging software available. I know WordPress and drupal are some of the more popular ones. And drupal isn’t even covered by this thing.

Also currently looking at BLOG:CMS and Movable Type (but that costs money and is owned by Six Apart and that’s scary) and Nucleus CMS. I like that BLOG:CMS comes with an integrated photo gallery, because that saves me trying to find a photo gallery CMS thingy myself. Too much choice dammit ):

Have also found Serendipity which also uses Smarty Tags for formatting. This seems like a good thing, as bBlog also uses Smarty tags, and could prove easier for me to migrate. Hum.

So, after implementing the new catchpa, the spam comments seem to have increased in number! Am seriously thinking of doing what Muki suggested and changing the name of the comments files to something else. But no time for that ):

So, I’ve disallowed comments on all previous posts except hte last 4 or so. And I’ll be using the bBlog feature that lets me set how long until comments are disabled. For now, I’ll probably make allow comments for 2 weeks and then it’ll auto-disable. Hopefully that’ll keep the number down for now.

I’ll blog properly later I think, right now, I want to keep watching One Tree Hill :D :D

Ok, so I’ve installed a new ‘catchpa’ system for comments on here. Hopefully, it’ll keep away all those frigging SPAM comments. Yeay.

Thanks to the code found here:
Added simple comment spam protection

If bBlog ever gets updated, hopefully they’ll add this to their features.

Fixed the stupid thing. I worked out that when they transferred my stuff, they obviously didn’t check the tables very carefully. They forgot to make the postid field of the posts table AUTO INCREMENT in which case, the thing kept falling over when I was trying to post, because it went “oh, default value 0… but I have one of those already?”.

Yeah, take that stupid idiots. I just feel sorry for the people that say, don’t know about computers or databases and they would’ve been all upset that their thing borked.

In other news, I got my PL/pgSQL function WORKING today. YEAY!!!! It’s only a SMALL SMALL part of my thesis, but it makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something and that’s heaps good :D Hopefully this weekend will be filled with lots of writing of technical jargon and showing off cool pictures. I LOVE pgAdmin III‘s “Explain” function. I mean, I know other programs have it, but I just like the way it visualises the query and makes this cool picture out of it. Very useful for seeing what’s going on, although the ‘subquery’ icon isn’t useful – would be good if the subquery would also be explained and expanded to show the little graphics thing.

to a new host!
Yeap, I’ve found a better deal at a different server so tylandrian.net is moving! Not that I don’t like our current host, but only having one database is a little limiting.
Anyways, the site may be down for a few days whilst the nameserver info propagates and they transfer everything to the new server. ^^

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.