blivet.com

It’s bloooggg madness!!! I’ve pushed the shiny red button! It’s a brand new “Powered by WordPress” site here with new a new look and feel to go along with all that new plumbing. (And, in case it sucks, it’s just in time for April Fools so I can take it all back.)

Here’s a few things that are different:

• You can search the blog! Who needs categories with power like that? Go ahead! Search for “Angel” and read all my pithy commentary on — what should be — everyone’s favorite television program.
• A handy, tastefully-colored, three-column layout and a default font that’s not nine times the size of God make it easy on the browser and the eyes. I freely admit I stole ideas from the Textpattern site and its templates.
• An Atom feed is now available along with my trusty ole RSS, which is still in version 2 format. If you subscribe to the site in a newsreader, no doubt every article will appear updated due to subtle changes in formatting. Sorry about that.
• Only 10 posts are shown on the front page and included in the feeds. I use to bore people with 15. Who knows, I may reduce this to only five if the yawning gets out of hand.
• Unfortunately there’s no longer any “preview” of comments. This is sadly a feature missing in WordPress. But I may just hack it in soon. In the meantime, use the Textile humane web text generator to check your formatting.

But the biggest change is the engine. Movable Type is dead. Long live WordPress. At least for today. We’ll see what happens when Ben and Mena finally roll out 3.0. I can be tempted by more toys. Easily. Then again, WordPress 1.2 may have arrived from Matt and the gang before then. Or an even better version of Textpattern. Or I might just write my own personal content management system. You never know.

Anyway, let me know what you think. God-willing it all works correctly with my hacks and band-aids. I would sure hate to pull the plug after all this work.

It’s pretty nice when my own ISP reads my blog, comments, and apologizes for the downtime I mentioned yesterday. DreamHost also took a big, detailed mea culpa for the failure in an email they sent me and the rest of their customers. Now that’s class. I recommend DreamHost to anyone.

And now I know more details about what happened. Turns out it wasn’t just a hardware failure. Here’s an excerpt from that “Network Outage Detailed Report with System Changes” email:

We now know the network outage was the result of a malicious Denial of Service attack aimed at a website hosted on our servers.

Whoa! Kind of make you wonder who the hackers were trying to take down on Monday. Or maybe it’s best that I don’t know.

I don’t know whether I get enough readers to notice but the site was really misbehaving yesterday. Just before 2 a.m. on Monday (and yes, I was awake so I noticed) one of my ISP’s routers went toes up and its fall-over system apparently did just that — it fell over, clattering loudly on the floor. Normally DreamHost, my ISP, has excellent uptime and handles any network hiccups with a quiet burp and a polite, “excuse me,” but Monday was filled with slow-motion throughput and mostly unreachable services as DreamHost struggled violently to stay online.

However, this was particularly disturbing when it first happened because:

1. I had just completed a major site restructuring, rewriting code and templates and such for the new content-management-system-that-isn’t-Movable-Type.
2. It was really late, I was very tired and thinking even less clearly than normal, if that’s possible.
3. Nothing was backed up yet. Nada. It was still all on a server which didn’t exist anymore as near as I could tell.

Scary. But now that everything — or at least the network — is back to normal. I have it all backed up, hidden away, and safe from nuclear holocaust.

Now before I get a comment asking, “are you ever going to switch your site over to WordPress or what?!?” let me just say that, “yes,” a WordPress-driven blivet.com is coming to an internet near you — a slightly hacked version of WordPress (more on that later), but the work is almost done except for the new style sheets. I expect the new look and feel to be rolled out, appropriately, for April Fool’s Day.

In the meantime, I’ve reconfigured my current Movable Type installation to use Textile to format all posts and comments. Why bother? Well, I plan to use Textile with WordPress and this was a good way to get all the content tweaked before I import it into the new system. Why Textile instead of Texturize? Especially since Matt fixed my nasty bug?

I’m such an ungrateful wretch. Really. Well, for one thing, that bug fix is in the unreleased version and has to be hacked into the stable release. But that’s easy and I’ve done so anyway. No, it’s mostly because Textile allows more complex formatting like the ordered list earlier in this post.

It’s also partly because Texturize requires three dashes to indicate an em dash instead of two, which it interprets as an en dash. I know this is a little thing and I’m sure I sound pretty old and particular as you read this, but I’ve been typing two dashes for so long that I just can’t make that change. Without hacking the code, of course.

Matt, if you’re reading this, you could always make the Textile and SmartyPants “dash” behavior an option for anal-retentive former typographers, like me.

Anyway, stay tuned for the new site. It’s coming any day now. Really. No, Really.

Wow. It’s either a slow news day or a lot more people than just me signed one of those online petitions to save the Angel television series because the whole campaign made the front page of CNN today.

This whole situation just depresses me. Not the campaign but the inevitability that the remaining Buffyverse will end, whether it’s this year or next year. Tuesday night at 8 has never been the same since Buffy ended last year. It’s not quite as depressing as the inevitability of my own demise, but you get the idea.

Only six more episodes starting April 14. Ouch. Here’s hoping the campaign will work.

Thankfully Matt Mullenweg, the author of Texturize and one of the lead WordPress developers, very nicely corrected me in a comment to yesterday’s post about my thinking WordPress has a fatal flaw. Actually, the unreleased alpha 1.2 version does have that problem but the stable 1.0.2 version does not. Which is great! Because that means WordPress is what I’m looking for after all.

And Matt says that “when 1.2 is released I can promise you it won’t have that bug.” Which is even better news since there’s nothing else about the alpha release I don’t like because Matt even fixed that Texturize bug! Go, Matt!

I continue to be impressed with the WordPress development team. Just a week go I reported a bug on the support forum, and Ryan Boren had it fixed and a patch mailed to me before anyone else had even read the post. Now that’s responsive.

Textpattern still looks very promising but after test driving it more last night and this morning, it’s a little less flexible than I thought. But I’m going to cut it a lot of slack since it’s still very good for a development release. I’m sure Dean Allen will address those issues.

In another comment to my same post yesterday, Buzz Anderson just cracked me up calling Blosxom the “Mach kernel philosophy of content management.” A very pithy description. And Buzz even uses it so I guess he was both funny and serious.

Anyway, it’s back to WordPress. The stable 1.0.2 version anyway.

Ugh. I was in love with WordPress for over a week. And I must admit it was fun while it lasted. I almost had the entire site converted to the new personal publishing platform and planned to “throw the switch” this weekend. In the process, I found several bugs in WordPress but managed to either fix them myself or work around them. Its PHP code is a bit sloppy but quite hackable. And I found its community of developers to be helpful.

Sure, the WordPress “Texturize” engine has a nasty bug which made it incorrectly encode many of my posts. In fact, if I had used it now it would incorrectly encode that previous sentence because it has quotes around a link. Ugh, again. But I worked around that too because I’m clever and persistent. Or at least persistent.

But then I found the “big” bug. The deal killer. The bug from which there is no workaround. Other than maybe a rewrite because, as near as I can tell, this is a fatal flaw in the design of WordPress. This is a flaw that prevents WordPress from having reliable permanent links to date-based entries, which is sad since “clean permalinks” is a big feature in the latest release. And it’s all due to the format in which WordPress stores and then retrieves dates from a MySQL database.

I will attempt to explain. But first, a little background …

Systems like Movable Type store blog entry dates based on the current time at the server installation, with an optional offset if the author is in a different time zone. For example, this would be Pacific Standard Time (PST) for my site. I don’t use the optional offset since I live in the same time zone as my server. Whenever Movable Type builds a SQL query for blog entries by date, it doesn’t need to make any adjustment to the input dates.

WordPress stores blog entry dates in Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). Whenever WordPress builds a SQL query for blog entries by date, it must make an adjustment with an optional offset for the author’s current time zone. For example, this would be 8 hours for me during Pacific Standard Time (PST) and 7 hours during Pacific Daylight Saving Time (PDT).

For about six months of the year the WordPress system works fine, providing the author doesn’t move between time zones. But when it’s time for everyone to change to or from Daylight Saving Time, the WordPress system breaks down. What happens? All the blog entries which fall outside the new time zone are shifted by one hour, possibly breaking date-based permanent links!

It’s easy to see the potential for this breakage in my previous blog entry. I posted that between 11 p.m. and midnight on Thursday, March 11. If I was using a date- and title-based archive nomenclature then the permanent link might be:

/archives/2004/03/11/spam-is-driving-me-to-wordpress.html

Or some such. Well, as soon as Daylight Saving Time kicks in on April 4 of this year, that blog entry will suddenly be shifted to March 12 between midnight and 1 a.m.! Which means that WordPress would change its permanent link as well.

What’s worse is that this can’t be easily fixed in WordPress. You can’t just adjust for Daylight Saving Time in the SQL query because you could be getting back a range of results across time zones. Storing the dates in GMT essentially loses the context of the original time zone in terms of the way WordPress constructs its SQL queries.

Even though WordPress is very powerful and versatile, this date shifting really sucks. Especially for someone like me who’s made a large number of posts around midnight. Like this one.

Which is why I’m now seriously considering Textpattern as my new content management system. It’s also a PHP- and MySQL-based system like WordPress. But it stores and retrieves dates like Movable Type. Whew! More importantly, it’s very easy to use and is quite stable for a “gamma” release, whatever that is. Textpattern may not be as flexible as WordPress and you have to sort of buy into its author Dean Allen’s way of thinking about content management to enjoy it, but that didn’t really bother me as much as WordPress’ date shifting. The horror.

Textpattern has Textile built into its nifty web-based site and post editor. Textile is a formatting engine for translating carriage return-based input to HTML paragraph markup and special punctuation characters to HTML entities (like SmartyPants does). But Textile also has a shorthand language for doing even more complex markup like links, lists, and tables. Pretty cool stuff. Of course, a Textile plugin for Movable Type is available from Brad Choate.

There’s a few things Textpattern doesn’t support like Trackback, but I never used that much myself. One annoying thing is that the current version doesn’t appear to support external editors like NetNewsWire and ecto. However, the web-based editor is so good and I’m such a browser geek that, in a way, this is actually a big draw for me. Anyway, I’m so serious about Textpattern that I’ll likely switch over to it in the next few days providing I can get new site templates written quickly enough.

Also, I did wind up installing MT-Blacklist to help stem the tide of spam while I’m still on Movable Type. And, so far, it’s working very well, catching 100% of all my comment spam. It was easy to setup and manage. I recommend it highly if you’re waiting on Movable Type 3.0. Which I may be doing as well if Textpattern doesn’t work out like I hope.

Even a poorly read, and apparently poorly maintained, blog like mine gets spammed. You can read about my first attack last year in the archives. I’ve never received a barrage like Diane but lately it’s been once or twice a day, never on the front page, always on an archived entry, just enough to be annoying. Like gnats buzzing around my head.

And I’ve gotten tired of swatting them away. Especially with a blunt instrument like Movable Type. Rebuild, rebuild, rebuild the entire site whenever you delete one. Hurt me. I understand that Six Apart will add comment registration to version 3.0 of their publishing system. Unfortunately 3.0 has been long delayed (due to its developer’s understandable distraction from TypePad) and what it really needs is comment moderation instead of just registration, i.e. comments escrowed until the author, me, approves them.

I suppose I could install MT-Blacklist, since I’ve had good luck with similar tools to combat the swarm around my email inbox, and not worry about registration or moderation. But that rebuild, rebuild, rebuild thing about Movable Type has really started to bug me. So I started looking around for something to squash all of these insects.

Last week I discovered WordPress. It’s the successor to b2, a publishing system I looked at two years ago but decided was a little undercooked for my tastes. Still, it was PHP- and MySQL-based, two of my favorite web technology ingredients, and showed a lot of promise with its dynamic “no rebuild, no static pages” delivery model. And now WordPress may have delivered on that promise with even more nifty features like search engine-friendly permalinks.

But I’ll find out in a few days how good it is when I install it to run this blog. I hope to say “goodbye” to spam and the rebuild, rebuild, rebuild cycle. In the meantime, comments are disabled. I’d like to read your feedback about this on the site but that will have to wait. My apologies.