Niels’ Homepage

The smart observer may have noticed a very small change in this website. All permanent links do no longer link to anchors in the monthly archives, but to the individually archived entries themselves.

Now you could ask yourself: Why? Just wait and see :).

After seeing that NanoBlogger 3.3 RC5 came out I started to upgrade to this version. But instead of using my own upgrade notes I took a shortcut and used a simple DirDiff session with ViM to find all the necessary differences. Boy did this cause some problems. NanoBlogger refused to index other years than the current one.

Ofter a small email exchange with Kevin I tried starting NanoBlogger from scratch and then putting in changes one-by-one. After copying my local plug-ins directory ($BLOG_DIR/plugins) I all of a sudden had my problem again. My first thought: o no, I have to debug one of my plug-ins. So I removed all local plugins and started adding my own plug-ins to the local directory. This time everything went well. Now the difference between the current set-up and the previous one is that I had a full repository of plug-ins in $BLOG_DIR/plugins, i.e. all NanoBlogger plug-ins were copied there as well. But the new NanoBlogger provides a standard mechanism to have a local repository of plug-ins. My conclusion therefore is that the duplicate NanoBlogger plug-ins were causing the problems.

Thanks Kevin for taking the time to answer my e-mail and my apologies for taking a shortcut despite the experience I already had with upgrading.

While I was busy re-creating the site I took the opportunity to make some changes:

1. I started using the nb_default stylesheet. I think it is nicer looking than nb_spring on which my previous style was based.
2. The styles for the Gallery plug-in and the Code plug-in were put into their own stylesheets and links to these stylesheets were added to the templates in $BLOG_DIR/templates

A link to the AScopy web site has been added to the links menu.

A new day a new look. NanoBlogger version 3.3-RC4 has been released yesterday. Always ready to try out new things I upgraded this site to that version as well. I followed the steps mentioned at the NanoBlogger User Manual and some extra steps and now everything seems to be working fine again. Steps taken:

1. Renamed the directory where this site is stored to something else. In my case: mv ~/Projects/www ~/Projects/www.org.
2. Downloaded the new release, unpacked it and set my PATH to the new NanoBlogger directory. Tested with nb --version if that went well.
3. Created a new weblog using nb -a. This assumes that $BLOG_DIR is set of course.
4. Deleted the default entry from NanoBlogger: nb -d 1.
5. Copied the data/ directory from the original directory to the new directory.
6. I have a local copy of my plugins. So the plugins/ directory from the distribution have been copied to $BLOG_DIR.
7. Copied some personal plugins (google.sh, gallery.sh and code.sh) to the correct places in the local plugin directory ($BLOG_DIR/plugins).
8. The stylesheet for this site is base on the nb_clean.css stylesheet. So that stylesheet was copied to to heirbaut_nl.css. From the original’s site stylesheet the additions for the gallery and code plugin were added. See the result here.
9. GViM was started in diff-mode with the original and the new blog.conf files. All personal settings were also put it the new blog.conf.
10. GViM was started in diff-mode with the original templates/main_index.htm. All personal settings (navigation menu) were put in the new templates/main_index.htm.
11. Same for templates/main_links.htm.
12. Run DirDiff on the old and the new directory and checked if anything was missing. There was: images/galleries. So that directory was copied to the new location as well. Other diffing tools would do as well, of course. I just like ViM :).
13. Ran nb -u all. Checked that everything was fine.
14. Added this entry and uploaded the site using sl (which can expect some additions in the near future).

And now I am going to have some coffee…

One of the reasons I don’t provide a comment facility is that it is very hard to prevent spammers from abusing your weblog. The easiest way to prevent spamming is to work with a registration system: you can only post a comment if you have registered. This has the disadvantage that anonymous people, or people who accidentally came at your site and found something interesting, can’t post comments.

One method of making it possible for anonymous users to post comments is asking the user to type in the text appearing in a so-called CAPTCHA. But if the captcha is too simple the spammer’s automated systems will recognize the text in the picture and are then still able to log in and put spam in the comments. Captchas also have the disadvantage that people that have to rely on, for example, braille readers, cannot post anonymously.

Apart from the braille readers I think the captchas can be best implemented in the following manner:

1. Make sure that the letters in the captcha are all of a different color and are overlapping. Overlapping letters make it harder for OCR software to guess the ‘word’.
2. Don’t always ask the user to type in the whole word, but rather one of the following questions:
   1. Type in all letters from the captcha (mentioned that already, just being complete).
   2. Ask the user to provide a subset of the letters in the captcha. For example the first and the third letter. The subset should not be fixed, but be chosen at random.
   3. Ask the user to provide the color of one or more of the letters in the captcha. Since not all the weblog readers will be native speakers of your weblog’s language, it would be best to provide check boxes so that language mistakes can be prevented.

This ofcourse combined with the possibility to create user accounts so that if a spammer succeeds in breaching these barriers, the decision can always be made to shut off anonymous posting.

Another possibility is to also work with a blacklist that contains words and sites that are not allowed to appear in a comment.

Creating captchas on the fly might not always be possible. Especially not since I will be relying on Bash. So it might be a nice idea to write a tool that can create a lot of captchas and a list with the text and colors that are used in each off-line. These can then be sent to the site and the comments plugin would only have to choose a random captcha and a random question (see above) and check the answer with the information from the file. If these ‘standard’ captchas are refreshed on a regular basis it should provide some nice protection from the spammers.

It seems that the tools from ImageMagick provide all the functionality needed so I will have a look at them this weekend.

I asked for it: never, ever upgrade something without really testing it. As mentioned before I upgraded from RC1 to RC3, but I have never taken the time to make sure that the customized plugins I use are also known to the new version. In my case this concerned the fortune and the Google plugin.

So now I have created a personal plugin directory as part of the website generated by NanoBlogger and adjusted my local blog.conf so that NanoBlogger sees this directory.

I noticed that there was an update to NanoBlogger. So as my last act for today I have upgraded the site to NanoBlogger 3.3 RC3 from RC1. Completely missed about the RC2 version that had a critical bug fix. Oops. I am glad that it didn’t bite me.

If you are reading this: Welcome!

A lot has happened the last week. First the domain heirbaut.nl is now hosted by BHosted.nl. They offer a very complete hosting package for a very reasonable price.

I also moved away from Blosxom as my CMS. NanoBlogger fits my needs better. To me it is easier to use, setup and maintain. So instead of tinkering I can finally get some blogging done. To make my life even easier I decided to use Markdown, which even takes away the hassle of inserting HTML code in my weblog entries.

The site will be maturing (again :) ) the coming weeks. A small project, that sprang into existence because of this site, will become available very soon.
And I am hoping to be able to publish some documentation on the long term personal project that I am working on.

Time to go now, have fun and if you want to contact me, the address is on the left in the navigation section.