To make things explicitly clear, my blog is copyrighted and licensed
as “All rights reserved”. It even says that at the footer of every page.
That means you may not redistribute any content without my permission.
Yes, this means you, Ross Beazley. I may allow aggregation sites to
redistribute my content, but the only sites where I have given explicit
permission are Planet Debian and Planet BNM. I am unlikely to be upset
if your aggregation site links back to the original entry and does not
carry advertising, and will probably give you permission. If both these
conditions are not met, you do not have permission and will not be
granted permission.

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.