23sen uutiset

For some time now I have been thinking of implementing new sidebar entry: Recent comments. Now that there seems to be some new comments on this blog, I finally did write the code for it. There is nice cached index for the sidebar entry, which gets updated when new comment is posted or old one is remove.

I already pushed the code to the git repository, but I am not going to release Kukkaisvoima version 10 just yet. I am thinking of adding nice array for sidebar, which will tell what entries there will be, so that it will be easier to exclude something and add new things to it, if someone wishes. Also it might be good to test this sidebar stuff for a while.

By the way, I noticed really nice disqus integration for Kukkaisvoima on brian hefele's untidy space blog. If one is not that fond of Kukkaisvoima's default commenting system that one looks like a really good alternative. Check it out.

From time to time somebody (you know who you are) keep asking, if I will set up public revision control repository for Kukkaisvoima. I have been using Git distributed revision control from the beginning, so it seemed to be logical to put up public Git repository for Kukkaisvoima, so I did that. You can now find the public Git repository of Kukkaisvoima here: http://github.com/Petteri/kukkaisvoima/tree/master. The Git clone url can be found at that page and general Git instructions can be found from the Git User's Manual.

Current Kukkaisvoima version does not seem to have any bugs and I don't have any plans for new features, so I don't think I will update the source code too often. When I do, I will put those fixes to that repository. All patches are also welcome.

Version 8 has a little bug in the search function. When doing search Kukkaisvoima first strips all html tags from the text and then does the matching. The stripping sometimes stripped too much of the text and thus the search failed. Version 9 hopefully fixes this annoying bug. For download see Kukkaisvoima's homepage.

Finally something new on this front. Last kukkaisvoima version was released over a year a go. Long time no new features. After writing some new content to my blog, I discovered couple of features that Kukkaisvoima was missing: archive pages and search. Version 8 adds both.

Big change in version 8 is also the license change from GPL2 to AGPL3. Basically it means that if you modify index.cgi you should provide source to the modified version. I put a special clause to both css and settings files so that it is clear that those can be modified freely.

You can download version 8 at the usual place. See Kukkaisvoima's homepage for more information.

Version 8 intruduces three new pages to Kukkaisvoima

/archive This page adds archive of all blog entries in date order. Newest first. One could also use this page as front page of the blog, since it gives nice fast overview whats happening.

/categories Here is entries sorted by category. Nice for quick overview. There is even pages for each category at /categories/category_name.

/?search=term . Biggest change is the search page. Basically the search works like unix tool grep. Downside is that it matches the searched string only in one line, so no searches reaching between lines, sorry. This seems to work quite nicely. Search box is in the sidebar.

I also fixed some minor bugs and refactored the code a little. One functional change is that I dropped the urls category/category_name and replaced it only with urls /category_name. So urls are now somewhat shorter. As you know Cool URIs don't change, so you should redirect old urls to new ones.

New language variables in version 8:

   l_search = "Search"
   l_search2 = "No matches"
   

There is also couple new css id's

   #content3 { 
            margin-top: 10px;
            margin-bottom: 10px;
            padding:20px;
            line-height: 120%
            }
   pre {
      padding: 1em; 
      border: 1px solid gray;}

   #hit { 
      display: inline;
      text-decoration: none;
      background: #693;
      }
   

If you have your own css file you should add those.

So that were the changes this time. I have no plans for version 9, but it will appear when (and if) I get new ideas or if there are bugs in this version. As always patches are also welcome.

ps. By the way, new version of another light weight blog engine Blosxom was also released recently after long hiatus.

I finally took the time to find out how to convert all my blog entries to utf-8 encoding. My entries were in iso-8859-15, since that was the default in this machine when I put put this blog up. Debian running this site has iconv program installed, which converts encoding of given files. One shell line and all entries were converted. Nice. The only problem was that it messed my time stamps for all entries, but that was expected. I had to convert also kukkaisvoima_settings.py file, since that was also in iso-8859-15.

Here is the shell commands used to convert all my entries:

for x in *.txt;do iconv -t utf-8 $x -o $x.bak; mv $x.bak $x ;done;

If someone is going to use that, remember to take backups of all entries before the convert operation.

I wrote version of Kukkaisvoima with the C programming language. Its purpose is not to replace the Python version. I just wrote it to see, how easy would it be to convert Kukkaisvoima to some other platform. Since Kukkaisvoima is quite small app, converting it was not that hard. Maybe I should do Haskell or Oz version next.

The C version can use the same blog entry files as the Python version. You can see live demo of the Kukkaisvoima suvi 67 here. It should be mostly indentical with the Python version. Maybe little faster.

If you are interested in the source, I put it to Kukkaisvoimas homepage. Here is a direct link to the source. It is not packaged in any way, so it is just one plain C file. If your webserver has cgi support and GCC, you can use it easily. Just remember to change the defines on the source to match your settings. Compiling it is quite straightforward: gcc kukkaisvoima_suvi_67.c -o index.cgi.

Comparing to current Python Kukkaisvoima, it lacks comment support and only ascii characters are supported in blog entry filenames. Some access Urls have also been streamlined. Reason for not implementing comments at this point is that Python version uses pickle module for comments. I can't add support for those types of comments nicely. It should be easy to do something similar, like just plain txt file comments, and I might add that later if I have inspriration.

Writing Kukkaisvoima from scratch gave me couple of nice refactoring ideas, which I plan to implement with the Python version later.

Eight months from last release and no reason for new one. That just means version 7 is working nicely without major bugs. So since there is not much happenings on this front, I decided to present you a collection of blogs powered by kukkaisvoima found with google. Maybe these will inspire someone to have fun with css or something.

Series of Tubes

Hic Svnt Dracones!

aitchyou8.net

Musings of a Digital Brain

Notice that people switch blogging software quite often. I have used at least 10 different blog softwares before writing Kukkaisvoima. That said those urls might not contain Kukkaisvoima blogs tomorrow.

If anyone reading this have more links to Kukkaisvoima powered blogs post ulrs to comments.

Happy new year :)

Deleting comments have been little hard with Kukkaisvoima. Version 7 fixes this problem intruducing admin interface to delete comments. When you are viewing some specific blog entry, you get Admin heading on the sidebar. Clicking it will append ?admin to the url and show delete comment link beside comment. Clicking delete comment will ask password (new setting variable for version 7) and delete comment if the password is correct. Deleting comment will erase it permanently.

Second improvent in version 7 is spam question. Commenting blog entry will now ask question which will hopefully reduce spam.

Kukkaisvoima 7 got also some "refactoring" and new setting variables:

• nospamanswer = '5' (Answer to spam question)
• passwd = 'password' (password for deleting comments)

Since kukkaisvoima_settings.py contains now somewhat sensitive information you should block all access to it from public web. For example I have the following settings on my .htaccess file:

<files kukkaisvoima_settings.py>
 order allow,deny
 deny from all
</files>

If the passwd value is set to 'password' comments cannot be deleted from web interface. This is for those, who for some reason cannot hide the kukkaisvoima_settings.py and still want to use Kukkaisvoima.

Version 7 intrudes also some new language variables

• l_nospam_question = 'What\'s 2 + 3?'
• l_delete_comment = 'Delete comment'
• l_passwd = 'Admin password'
• l_admin = 'Admin'
• l_admin_comments = 'Manage comments'
• l_do_you_delete = 'Your about to delete comment this, are you sure you want to that?'

Download version 7 here.

I made two improvements to Kukkaisvoima today. First fixed the spam problem with spam question handling (borrowed the idea from Quo Vadis? :D). The second fix is interface to delete comments from blog. I will test these features for a week or so, before releasing next version of Kukkaisvoima.

Comments on the sidebar feature will be pushed to version eight, since it will somewhat change the comment Class and break the pickled comments. I will try to do some simple comment converter, so that old comments can be preserved

Today first spam arrived to this blog. It sure shows that Kukkaisvoima is vulnarable to spam. It seems that every entry got its own spam message. Nice to know that this specific url on whole net is finally reached some critical mass that makes this blog worth of spamming :D I think version seven with spam question just got relevant. I'll try also to finish some other features which I started before releasing it (comments on sidebar and small script to manage comments), so that it would be worth the upgrade hassle.

Edit: Since it seems that more spam is coming, I will temporary close comments on this blog until I will get the question fix ready.