I'm currently upgrading my blog to PyBlosxom 1.4.3. I apologise for any broken links or entry flooding.

Update: I've finished playing now. I've upgraded to 1.4.3 and I don't think I've broken anything yet.

I've also taken the opportunity to add a couple of plugins to add tagging to entries and added the obligatory tag cloud to the side bar rather than the list of months. I'm going to make some changes to the comment plugin later to add OpenID support. I'd be interested to know of any other pyBlosxom plugins you find useful.

I did manage to make a mistake by using vim to edit entries to add some tags rather than my wrapper script to keep timestamps the same. This is where I'm glad I have a database table with the metadata from all my entries to hand. A quick touch foo.txt -d 2006-06-07 19:02:57+01 later and everything was fixed. Hopefully not too many people got bitten by the few entries that had new dates for a few minutes. Please let me know if you notice anything broken.

Tim Bray just posted an entry about including a comment count in his atom feed. He said that he soon disabled it as people complained that it meant they saw the entry again as an updated entry. As I've recently done the same for my atom feed, I'm confused as to why this is happening. In my case I don't update either <published> or <updated>, just the <content> element. As the guid never changes, readers shouldn't consider it updated. Do readers really take a hash of the contents and consider it updated if it changes? Why do readers ignore the date fields. Is this affecting anyone? Certainly, it doesn't seem to affect Planet or the few readers I've tried it on.

I upgraded my atom feed to atom 1.0 during the week. This appears to have broken my entries on Planet Debian. If anyone has any ideas on what I can do to make planet like me with a valid atom 1.0 feed, please let me know.

Update: I've changed my feed from having html content to xhtml, which isn't encoded. Hopefully Planet will like this. If not I'll have to fix it in the morning.

Came back from a nice walk on the seafront, including a 30 minute professional firework display from a boat 20 meters offshore and about 50 people watching, to find that someone had attempted to attack my blog comment to send spam. Fortunately according to my mail logs, nothing went out, but it did make me go through and read the comment plugin code. I did wonder if every suitable field had been cleaned and have now made sure that it is. Looks like it came from several IP addresses over a 5 minute period and got past my (admittedly very) simple turing test, so I don't think it was an automated script. For an example of the attacks, check out this old posting.

One thing I forgot to mention is that I've been working on a new layout for my website, which is mostly completed. Still need to do some work on some of the styling, but I'm mostly happy with the layout of the site. It's not exactly an original design, but it's a significant improvement on the half style I used to have.

The next step is to improve the style so I don't have to repeat the style and html on every page and I'm hoping to do it without php. I have some cunning plans involving python and xslt, but we'll see how that goes.

Also, after several months, I fixed my blog comments to not give a 500 Server Error, so people can now freely spam my comments. Turns out that the comments plugin didn't have write permission to the comments directory, but pyblosxom kindly didn't prove any hints beyond "Premature end of script headers". Cheers.