Back online

Michael Dale

The internet was connected today. So I've got the web server temporality going. I'm going to replace it with something else as it is too noise and doesn't work correctly.

Our Dead TV

Michael Dale

The background is meant to be blue :)

Bluetrait 2

Michael Dale

I've decided to rewrite Bluetrait.

It's had a good run.

Getnews (the blog script that I wrote before Bluetrait) was aimed at providing a very basic blog with commenting support. It did this well, but a lot of it was hardcoded to my domain/style so it wasn't really useful for anyone else.

I wrote Bluetrait 1 as to allow others to easily use/install it. It had/has a very basic template type system. Over the revisions it has been slowly upgraded and now includes:

• Good spam filtering. I think I'll finally got to a stage where I'm happy with it.


• Awesome looking admin panel thanks to Stuart.


• Event Viewer (which I really like having)


• Basic RSS support


• User management.

It has worked well on my site for almost 3 years! But it has some limitations that are starting to annoy me. The biggest problem I currently have with it is the way the CMS side works.

There is no way to categories pages and as my project page grows it is becoming an issue.

So I'm going to take what I've learnt with Bluetrait 1 and rewrite it.

I'm aiming to make Bluetrait 2 able to cope with all kinds of content for example:

• RSS


• Atom


• Content/CMS


• Blog

The idea is that the core of Bluetrait will have a section that allows people to design their own plugins which allows the system to handle any kind of data output.

Bluetrait 2 will also require PHP 5 as I'm using the PDO database class to allow for almost any kind of database (mysql, sql lite etc).

So the coding has started. Plugin support is almost done. I don't expect to have anything finished this year, hopefully early next year.

phpbb 3 RC1

Michael Dale

phpbb 3 RC1 is finally out!

I upgraded my old forums to have a play, I like it.

web server

Michael Dale

The Web Server is having issues *again*.

This time it looks like one of the CPUs isn't working. So it's going to be running with a single cpu until I get around to fixing it :|

EDIT: Still having issues. Might be a power supply issue, but we don't have another one to test with.

Dashboard Lite - WordPress 2.2 Plugin

Michael Dale

Josh created a custom index.php way back in WordPress 1.5 days that removed the RSS feeds on the WordPress dashboard.

Up until now it wasn't really possible to this with a plugin nicely. WordPress 2.2 has added an API hook that although not relevant to the Dashboard it is in the right place!

So I've created a simple plugin, which you can download here, that removes the RSS feeds. Please note it requires WordPress 2.2.

What data is being sent to Akismet?

Michael Dale

I just read an interesting post here about what data is sent to the Akismet servers. A surprising amount, including the whole $_SERVER array!

I wouldn't be too happy with that myself. Bluetrait's implementation of the Akismet client sends the following information:

Comment Author

Comment Author Email Address

Comment Author Website Address

Content of Comment

Author's IP Address

Type of Comment (i.e Trackback, Comment etc)

Bluetrait's implementation sends the following information:

Comment Author

Comment Author Email Address

Comment Author Website Address

Content of Comment

Author's IP Address

Type of Comment (i.e Trackback, Comment etc)

Plus the $_SERVER array with the following information removed:

'HTTP_COOKIE',

'HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR',

'HTTP_X_FORWARDED_HOST',

'HTTP_MAX_FORWARDS',

'HTTP_X_FORWARDED_SERVER',

'REDIRECT_STATUS',

'SERVER_PORT',

'PATH',

'DOCUMENT_ROOT',

'SERVER_ADMIN',

'QUERY_STRING',

'PHP_SELF' ;

Unfortunately this is more than I first stated, I'm going to review the data being sent. It shouldn't contain any extra data that is personal.

EDIT: Some more info here. Looks like Akismet sends the all cookies that are from that domain. i.e anything the client (the person posting the comment) is logged into. The post is a bit old (2005) so this behavior may have changed.

EDIT2: I just checked the source code from WordPress 2.1.2 it looks like cookies are no longer sent, everything else still is.

BTEV Wordpress Plugin Page

Michael Dale

BTEV now has a WordPress plugin page

Downtime

Michael Dale

Sorry about the downtime. There are some issues with Apache that are causing the server to lockup; I haven't had time to look into it yet.


The reason I didn't get to it quicker was that I had been at Heron Island for the week (which was awesome).

New Moblie

Michael Dale

Got myself a new mobile today. Bit of an impulse buy, but my old phone was starting to act up.

Anyway I got myself a Nokia E65.

Seems to work fairly well, its fast and does phone stuff :)