Sporkmonger

Alright, that’s it. I’ve had it. Just got hit with another hundred or so spammy trackbacks.

I’m sick of Typo. Too much trackback spam, and no good way of defeating it with Typo. Typo doesn’t even let you disable trackbacks. It has an option for disabling it, but it doesn’t seem to actually do anything. Plus regular expressions and simple string blacklists that don’t match against the poster’s name, email address, or uri simply aren’t enough. It’s time to migrate to Mephisto. I’d been planning on sticking with Typo until GentleCMS was done and then rolling my own setup, but this is much too frustrating. So yeah, I’m starting the work required to switch over as of right now. Might take me a couple days because I have customizations to the Typo codebase, but if you have trouble leaving comments or if the site goes down entirely, you’ve probably just caught me in the middle of trying something. And apologies if any comments get lost in the fray.

I’ll probably end up implementing something similar to what Sam Ruby has going because a) it’s simple and b) seems to work.

Update: Now that I think about it, I might “reboot” the design while I’m at it. I found my missing spork the other day, so it’ll likely make a reappearance in the header image for the new design.

Update: It’s going to take longer than I thought to get the blog migrated. In the meantime, I’ve rather forcibly mangled Typo’s trackback support by rerouting trackbacks to the homepage. Didn’t feel like wading through Typo’s code when a one line patch to routes.rb would work. I’ll get everything working again later. The blog conversion has been largely delayed by TextDrive not answering support requests (grr) and by myself being preoccupied with work for a client. Some cool stuff that I can’t wait to show off.

I’m beginning to think that perhaps, maybe, I should write a daemon that will, oh, I don’t know, auto-repair my blog when it breaks. Nothing like Daedalus of course, TextDrive doesn’t like that. Just something to make these incessant 502 errors go away, since it seems that lighttpd wants to just die off every once in a while. That and the cron job for bringing the site up after a reboot always seems to go off before PostgreSQL is good and ready to do its thing.

Yeah, that might be a good idea.

I am absolutely not a designer. While I probably do have measurable traces of creative juice flowing in my blood, I tend to think that most of it is directed at code and such.

So please be gentle with comments on my latest creation, which is a lot more of a foray into the designer realms than I’m used to. The whole typo design contest thing was too good to pass up.

I’m still a little apprehensive about having used Courier for the type, as it seems to be an excessively unorthodox thing to do. But I kinda like it, so I’m going with it.

Update: Is it just me or are the TypoGarden site’s entries appearing and disappearing, mostly at random?

Update: Hmm, well, since it’s happening on several different computers, I’m going to assume it’s not just me. Manually clearing Firefox’s cache fixes the problem, so I’m going to assume it’s an issue with the time to live being way too long.

I finally got around to updating Typo. I switched over to PostgreSQL at the same time. Unfortunately, because of the database switch, I had to migrate a lot of the content over manually, by hand. (Conversion scripts didn’t work.) Very painful.

I apologise if unique ids on the site feeds got messed up. Not much I could do about that without making the process even more painfully manual. If there was a good OS X frontend for PostgreSQL it might’ve been worth it, but pgAdmin is too mind-bogglingly awful to make the attempt.

But now I have syntax highlighting for my code, so I’m happy. Syntax highlighting should also work in the comments as well. Also, I went through and added syntax highlighting to the old articles and everyone’s comments where appropriate, and cleaned up any bad text formatting, so all your comments look pretty now.

Also, as you can see, I’ve gone through and tagged everything. I was planning on having one of those cool tag cloud things that Typo lets you have, but as it turns out, since every post is tagged with ‘feedtools’, that just meant that there was a big huge 72pt-font-tag and a couple of really, really tiny ones.

Anyways, Typo macro filters (such as syntax highlighting) are explained in detail here in case you want to make use of them in your comments.

Thanks again, Scott (and everyone else who’s been working on it) for all the hard work you’ve been doing on Typo!