guusbosmannl

Last week уе have been testing with the trial version of the new site. Jaap, Jean-Paul, Jerry, Mieke and Rob have found a couple of problems and suggestions for improvements.

Here's is what they found:

1. Bug: the Recent Comment block doesn't show an author.
2. Bug: The order of the comments looks strange. "I don't get the order of the comments. As I watch this news item, the comments don't look ordered by date. Do they? Should they?".
3. Feature request: Use a default image for users that don't have an image & anonymous users.
4. Feature request: perhaps it's useful to be able to delete your own comments.
5. Bug: The signature (for comments) doesn't really work nice: you always have to "move it aside" before you can start typing a comment. The cursor isn't placed on a useful place.
6. Feature request: It would be nice if the signature is visually separated from the comment by a line or something.
7. Bug: Preview doesn't show HTML code.

Here are my findings for these items:

1. Fixed with the comments module patch.
2. The script I used to transfer comments from the old to the new website had a bug and this caused newly created comments in the new site to appear out-of-order. This will be fixed before the migration.
3. I like this idea, and I'll probably implement it. Can wait till after the migration.
4. I can see this being useful. I'll have to get to know the comments module of Drupal a bit better. Can wait till after the migration.
5. This was pretty annoying. I've downloaded an optional module that fixes this and made signatures in general much nicer. Fixed.
6. Included in (5). Fixed.
7. I couldn't really reproduce this one. However, I noticed that the &ltb> and &lti> tags were not allowed in the HTML filter which may have caused the confusion. I'll make sure to add these again to the filter right after the migration.

While working on adding the author name to the Recent Comments block I saw a lot of feature requests on Drupal.org to make the amount of comments that is displayed in the block configurable.



Since I was working on that code anyway I created a second patch to allow the administrator to set the amount of comments shown.

Download the patch for Drupal 5.1 to make the number of comments configurable for the recent comments block.

Installation

To install this patch download the text file and save it as 51comments2.patch on your server. This patch has been tested with Drupal 5.1.

cd /var/www/htdocs/(yoursite)
cd drupal
patch modules/comment/comment.module 51comments2.patch                     

The result will look like this:

Hmm...  Looks like a unified diff to me...
The text leading up to this was:
--------------------------
|--- /home/guus/drupal-5.1/modules/comment/comment.module       Mon Jan 29 22:51:53 2007
|+++ comment.module     Sat Mar  3 03:15:59 2007
--------------------------
Patching file comment.module using Plan A...
Hunk #1 succeeded at 240.
Hunk #2 succeeded at 504.
Hunk #3 succeeded at 1892.
done

I've started testing a new version of this website. One of the testers commented on the Recent Comments block.


Unlike the current site's Recent Comments block (for PHP Nuke), the new site didn't display the author of each comment in the list with recent comments. I didn't like that either so I fixed it.

Tonight I've also made this change available to other users of Drupal with a patch. The source code of Drupal is much, much nicer than the PHP Nuke's code and I'm glad I'm finally making the move to a modern system.

Download the patch for Drupal 5.1 to add comment author names to the recent comments block.

Examples:

Option 1: no comment authors (default).

Option 2: with comment authors.

Installation

To install this patch download the text file and save it as 51comments.patch on your server. This patch has been tested with Drupal 5.1.

cd /var/www/htdocs/(yoursite)
cd drupal
patch modules/comment/comment.module 51comments.patch                     

Result will look like:

Hmm...  Looks like a unified diff to me...
The text leading up to this was:
--------------------------
|--- /home/guus/drupal-5.1/modules/comment/comment.module       Mon Jan 29 22:51:53 2007
|+++ /var/www/htdocs/testguusbosmannl/modules/comment/comment.module    Fri Mar  2 20:59:19 2007
--------------------------
Patching file modules/comment/comment.module using Plan A...
Hunk #1 succeeded at 51.
Hunk #2 succeeded at 252.
Hunk #3 succeeded at 270.
Hunk #4 succeeded at 292.
Hunk #5 succeeded at 520.
Hunk #6 succeeded at 1908.
done

It's been quiet on my website for a week, but back stage a lot of things are happening.

I'm working on a new version of the website using Drupal and I've spent last weekend and some evenings working on conversion scripts. Obviously I want to make sure all articles, comments etc are transferred completely, which takes a lot of time.

No promises yet (this has been a long running project) but I'm getting ready to make the switch and start using the new site.

In the last week the server for this website has experienced three outages. There seems to be something wrong with the fan on the motherboard (just like 2 years ago). Today's cause was not related to the fan, but there was a power outage in my parent's house and the main fuse switched off.

If the situation continues I might have to replace a part or some parts on the server.

I have access to a world-class monitoring system, so I receive a text message on my cell phone as soon as the web server is unreachable, and get nice reports on its availability (94.7% in the last 24 hours).

I did some technical work on the website tonight. Next to the existing RSS feed for articles, I've created a RSS feed that displays the 10 most recent comments.

A few weeks ago I installed Internet Explorer 7, and it has good RSS support built-in.

For the technically inclined: the RSS feed for comments.

One of the things I like about this website is that it's nice to look back at older articles and the things we did a year ago, or 4 years ago. Life is always changing, and it's great to capture memories.

As in 2002 and 2003, I plan to publish a year overview for 2006 in the first week of January. But of course, the series wouldn't be complete without 2004 and 2005 so I will publish those in December 2006. I've been working on them over the last 4 weeks, and they are getting ready for publication.

The 2004 year overview is planned for 12/18, and the 2005 overview for 12/26.

I've received a lot of nice feedback on the previous year overviews, and I hope you'll enjoy these as well.

For a long time I couldn't upgrade Guus Bosman.nl to a new version of the operation system, OpenBSD. There is a step in the upgrade process that requires physical access to the console, which is located in Middenmeer. My parents are hosting the website on the attic (thanks!)

It had been about two years since the last upgrade, to 3.5, but since OpenBSD releases a new version every six months I was almost 4 releases behind. Almost, because 4.0 will be released November 1st.

However, if I keep updating (from source) everytime a new release comes out I should be able to upgrade the server remotely.

Server.

Install script.

Next week I will upgrade the operating system on the server from OpenBSD 3.5 to 3.9. The 3.5 version is two years old, and no longer supported by OpenBSD.

Even thought I am using a good OS, the chain is only a strong as its weakest link and the software I have been using the last few years, PHP Nuke, has a terrible security track record.

It's not that I have a high-profile website, but still I like to keep my website secure and I've been looking for a replacement I can use, preferably written in Java. I am using PHP Nuke, but because of the small development team the amount of new features and updates is small.

I wanted to use (server-side) Java because that's what I use in my work all the time, and I believe it's a more robust solution than PHP. I spend some time on this two years ago also.

However, I have not been able to find a tool that does the job in Java. I tend to agree with this author that (at least for personal use) PHP is the way to go for website development, compared to J2EE.

Features I need in my new front-end software:

• A large community of developers
• Regular updates
• Very active security policy (hot fixes)
• Customizable, module based
• A rich feature set: comments, content, articles, user management, link management
• If at all possible, a good image management plugin
• Nice to have: Ajax support, Blog API support, WYSIWYG editor

After long searching I decided I cannot find an appropriate Java based tool. SnipSnap doesn't have a large enough user base for me, MMBase would require too much development and Roller doesn't have nice features and only supports a simple blogging site.

A few days ago a colleague showed me Sage, an extension to Firefox to read RSS feeds in your browser.

RSS is a technical protocol that allows users to read a website's latest articles in different applications, for example a stand-alone reader. Extremely useful or not, my father's website has it so I had to have it as well.

For those who are interested, a RSS 2.0 compatible feed is now available here.