05.11.05
Posted in blogging, internet, linux at 9:06 am by James
The funniest thing that one can do when googling (translates searching for help/info using google) is to find your own website. In the last 3 weeks I have hit my own website 3 times seearching for info on setting up various programs on linux. The most recent was because my brother was having troubles connecting to our smtp server using his Treo. My own post talked about problems with ident. Sure enough, Cingular has a blanket firewall that blocks most everything. So the mail server could not send ident requests to the Treo. Turning off ident still didnt solve the problem. I tried also setting
rfc1413_query_timeout = 0s
smtp_enforce_sync = false
but that still did not solve the problem. According to the exim logs the client just disconnects. So I guess some client side debugging may be in order. In the future, I need to add more info on my posts so that if i do come back to them, i can actually understand the problem and the solution I found.
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07.31.04
Posted in blogging at 5:20 pm by James
My blog is now running the WordPress 1.2. On Friday I was looking at photoblogging. I stumbled upon a few nice projects and a few good commentaries. Ideally I would like to be able to link a photoblog to gallery (Which i have not seen a good project yet). Linking to gallery providea s good framework and robust feature set. I understand many people want to keep photoblogs simple, but without the powertools underneath, you will not bo able to easily do more. I found one interesting post on using photoblogging with wordpress. Since i was using nucleus before, I would need to convert it over. I found some posts about using rss feeds to convert nucleus to wordpress. One developer in nucleus said he had something in the works. I didnt see anything, so I decided to write a script myself. After all, how hard could it be? Both Nucleus and WordPress are php with mysql backends. I think the craziest thing I have done was gut PostNuke and attempt to make it more modular.
Anyways, so I based the import script off the existing WordPress improt scripts. Nucelus does support multiple blogs, so I only allow to import one. I also excluded the nucleus karma since there it is not supported by WordPress. If you are intessted its at: http://james.onegoodcookie.com/pub/import-nucleus.phps.
[2006.02.04 15:10: Updated the URL. Sorry the script is not currently maintained. If you do have problems with it, I would be willing to help you if you can send me a copy of ur mysql database.]
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03.03.03
Posted in blogging at 4:03 pm by James
Postnuke benefits include:
1. Modularity: easy to program distinct units of code. Module standards ensure minimal name conflicts, and a greater degree of readability.
2. Wide array of built in modules: this is really cool since i dont have to constantly reinvent the wheel. For example the FAQ system is a stock commodity in any website.
3. Excellent session management: postnuke performs some pretty fancy variable handling under the hood. Most noteably is its handling of GET, POST, and SESSION vars.
Some drawbacks i encountered:
1. Lack of standards in modules: postnuke has standards imposed on top level function signatures. However, once inside the function, a developer can include random php libraries and then really just start doing crazy things.
2. Difficult to locate modules. the website modules.postnuke.com is pretty useful. It has news postings of new and updated modules. Sometimes I find it hard to use. Ideally, I would like a more freshmeat.net type index, where a single project won’t have multiple entries. This way I could easily view an index and see the range of modules that are available.
3. Limited extensibility of layout. This is not a black and white statement. Postnuke has excellent theme support. Additional modules such as centerblocks also facillitate this customization. However what I was looking for in particular was 1.) customizing the left and right blocks on a per module basis. I will have to give them credit though. This is not an easy task. In trying to implement this scheme, I found severe difficulties in actually how to organize this information.
4. Limited user/password system. I was intent on trying to build a ‘My Account’ area for postnuke under a seperate SSL server. Its a considerable hack to seperate the website like this. I’ve seen some posts on on the postnuke message forums concerning moving user.php. This does work, since this is the gateway for all my account functionality. However, it was getting to be a bit ugly, and so i decided to put this idea on the back burner.
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01.23.03
Posted in blogging at 10:19 am by James
Right now I am trying to setup the nucleus 2.0 beta. The look is fairly polished, but the backend mechanisms are lacking. Nucleus doesnt seem to write to files. So I had to copy/paste the config.php file and also my new blog main pages.
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