Monthly Archive for June, 2004

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Ahh! mod_rewrite madness, welcome to WordPress

Wow, that was a huge waste of time. I just spent 3 hours futzing with mod_rewrite trying to get it to forward everything from my old MT blog to this one. I ended up with a compromise–use symlinks for the archives and rewrite for the feeds. *Long drawn sigh* Among other issues mod_rewrite *requires* symlinks on which I disabled after I decided that I didn’t want to do symlinks the first time. Arn’t symlinks in www directories sort of a security threat? I mean, people can do amazing little things with them. For a while I was sharing mp3s with a simple symlink over a samba mount. Simple and effective enough.

On the positive side WordPress is much much cleaner than Movable Type. It also doesn’t feel like the devs are trying to keep me cornered with it’s interface. The PHP instead of perl helps too. I’m much more at home with php. I haven’t used any more modern blogging system than MT 2.6 before, wow this is the shaz. Everything from post passwords, simple multiple categories, atom feeds, (I wonder if it has the atom commenting interface).

On the plugin side I’d love to see wikipedia style commenting. They had a few plugins that explode out the html, the syntax for the ones I checked was overly complicated. I just want brackets & pipes for links, asterixes for li, etc. Everything else HTML will do. Also Spellcheck requires pspell compiled into php which I don’t have and don’t want to break my solid automatically updating debian-stable-backport I have set up by doing a compile so I’ll have to do without that. Makes no sense to me why it’d have such strict requirements.

More Hacks & things

  • BugMeNot.com, and un:asdf, pw:asdf, and variants before that or when that fails. This has saved me loads of time when account creation somewhere is broken, or a pita, or otherwise disabled.
  • Browser Keywords – so you can enter a few letters in your url bar and then terms and search. They then reference back to a bookmarks and replace %s (like printf :) Also works in Internet Explorer: see TweakUI. I do google and wikipedia and other more local searches (uni phone book, uni search, uni knowledge base, etc)
  • In linux (and macs for a few) know keyboard shortcuts–tab-completion, ctrl-a,ctrl-e, etc.
  • In windows use the wonderful GPL’d Dave’s Quick Search Deskbar for huge configurability and hundreds of functions and searches sitting on your taskbar. Extendable with javascripts and an automated creator is available

ryou.com seems like very cool screenscraping hack. We could use something like this for the US. Some of it is available I think but AFAIK not everything.

The Miami U campus library has a New spiffy website they’re prototyping. Complete with rss feeds I emailed in a comment which suggested these earlier today at roughly the time it was modified so maybe I had an effect, doubtful. All uni calendars should be downloadable in iCal format so that I can integrate them with mine. And everyone else likewise.

Oh and I helped add WebDAV support to a FTP based “Bookmarks Synchronizer (FTP)” for Mozilla Firefox. Now it is secure (via HTTPS) and easier to configure on a large scale. (You only need an .htaccess/.htpasswd file config’d and the DAV apache extension running on the server)

I cc’d the author the code from the Mozilla Calendar app which does iCal syncronization. It was originally from the Mozilla Composer app. Fun. He had support drilled in there within 24hrs. Try it and if it works for you add a WFM (works for me) comment so Torisugar i can add WebDAV to the extension’s title. Now the mozilla suite can do everything .Mac can. And I don’t have to sit around after my bookmarks get hosed anymore wishing I had made backups or wishing that I had this or that bookmark on the particular terminal I’m using.




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