Weblogs for Steve
Previously this site was accessible via IPv6 via the 6to4 tunnel - now it is using native IPv6 as provided by the hosting company (Bytemark).
Hopefully this should improve the IPv6 response times, by eliminating a couple of hops and round-trips.
I'd previously lowered the TTL on the appropriate DNS entries, so I hope this becomes live for everybody soon. If you're at the mercy of a bad DNS cache then I apologize for the temporary outage.
I've just been informed that the SSL certificate on this site had expired - so I've regenerated another one.
The certificate is still self-signed because nobody is throwing money at me, and I in turn don't want to throw money at verisign ;)
You can verify the fingerprint by following these instructions:
I've updated the webpages describing how to run the code behind this site yourself - the content hasn't completely been finished, but I'll work on it some more over the coming days.
The reason for the sudden update? We have yet another site using the code:
They're using a slightly older version of the code, but I think that might change in the near future. I'm not even sure if anybody noticed but I updated the way articles are linked on the site:
v.s http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/633 - the former is a lot more bookmarkable, although the latter will work forever too. Legacy links, love'em?
After a brief hiatus I've updated the code behind this site - there are probably only two user-visible changes:
- Weblog Editing : Tag Support
When you edit a weblog entry you've posted you can now edit/remove/update the tags which are applied to that entry.
- Link Changes
Although all past links to articles still work I've updated the default format. For example:
There are a few more changes which still need to be made to make polls and weblog entries have the same kind of link structure, but they won't take too long to finish I hope.
Behind the scenes some other things have been tidied up, and I hope I've avoided the submission of spam articles too!
I've also updated the planet to hide suspended users. D'oh.
This host has now been upgraded to Debian's Lenny release.
Please report any bugs you experience...
I think things are mostly OK, certainly the test suite output looks good, and the planet/etc is updating correctly.
The only issue I'm aware of is that "article read counts" are badly bogus, due to caching. Thats not a big deal and invisible to non-authors so I'm not going to lose sleep over it.
I've completed the first of my planned Lenny upgrades. It was mostly painless.
First of all I updated my sources.list file, then I ran:
apt-get update apt-get install apt apt-get dist-upgrade
There were no errors, no failures, and things seem good. Of course the machine I upgraded only runs one service (cfengine) so there wasn't too much likelihood of failure.
I'll leave it a week or so then upgrade this host.. Then on to my other boxes in rotation.
A couple of years ago when I wanted to setup this site. I looked around for the software to host it. I knew I wanted "a lightweight CMS a little like slashdot", but more than that I wasn't fussy.
Eventually I settled on a project I found listed on Freshmeat called YAWNS. This was suitable because it was simple, extensible, and coded in Perl.
Over a period of a few months I've updated, reorganized it, and generally made it mine. The original project disappeared from freshmeat, although it is still being used elsewhere, and things kept ticking over.
Recently the creator of the original codebase setup a new site:
The site? Written in perl of course. And using my version of his original software. All very circular.
Still for the first time I've been able to update the code documentation to list another known user.
(The code documentation is woefully incomplete, out of date, and that may well explain the reason why nobody else appears to use it publicly. Though I'm prepared to be surprised.
I've updated the code behind this site a little in an attempt to reduce the recent spam problem we've been having.
Yesterday I deleted 188 spam comments (well I didn't delete them, but I marked them as hidden). Each comment body contained 20+ URLs to spam sites, and was quite definitely "not good".
Just to recap:
- The anti-spam facilities mostly apply to anonymous users only.
- If you have an account and login you'll not be subject to them.
If you'd like to help you can click the "report this comment" link beneath any comment which looks like spam to you - that link is only visible if you're signed in though. If you're an anonymous user you'll not see it.
Only report comments which are either personally abusive, or clear spam. If you disagree with the comment reply back instead!
If you'd like to read about my solution I documented it over here.
Assuming I've not messed up we have IPv6 support again.
This time via 6to4.
Only basic testing has been done, but I see from the server access log that a few IPv6 addresses have hit the site so I'll assume it works... until I'm told it is broken.
I'm still here, and I still watch for interesting activity.
For the past few months I've been a little too pre-occupied to give this site the attention that it deserved, but hopefully that will change in the near future.
My blog is probably the best way to keep up with what I'm doing, and that lives over here.
Now, to make sure I don't forget in the near future there will be articles on the topics of:
- FUSE - Filessytems in userspace.
- Using valgrind.
I'll probably write something on exim4 too, since I've actually started doing interesting things with it. Surprising that I use it almost daily, but I mostly ignore the configuration. Then again maybe not, most of my SMTP-work these days is at a higher level.
I won't talk about what I've actually been doing to prevent the money-hungry trolling; though that can often be amusing. (These days anonymous trolls just get deleted; if people have no desire to sign their names to comments I see no reason to leave them in place. Non-anonymous people get corrected the first time, and ignored after that.)
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