LnBlog

I have returned

pageer@skepticats.com (Peter Geer)

It's hard to believe it's been 6 months since I posted an update here. That's by far the longest lapse since I started working on LnBlog.

If you're curious as to the reason, I started doing some serious refactoring back in late April and May, so the codebase was in serious flux. Then I got distracted looking for a new job. Then I found a new job and got distracted adjusting to it. Then I had to move for the new job and, well, you get the idea.

So now I'm settled in at my new job as a full-time LAMP developer, I'm moved into our new house and about ready to put the old one on the market, and so now I feel like a little hobby coding again.

I'll start with the bad news. I'm probably not going to be releasing anything for a little while, what with having to fix up the code and refamiliarize myself with where I left off. I'm also switching to PHP 5 after the next release, so if your host only has PHP 4, sorry, but you're out of luck. PHP 4 has finally been officially EOLed anyway, so it really is time for everyone who's still on version 4 to upgrade.

The good news is that I've already uploaded some fixes to my site, so it should be mostly working again. I've also been getting lots of good experience at my new job, so I'm expecting the overhaul of LnBlog to speed up. I've also got lots of new features in mind, particularly on the user interface side. But first I have to clean up the mess I made earlier this year.

There will be more updates in the coming weeks. Stay tuned!

Now on a subdomain

pageer@skepticats.com (Peter Geer)

Well, now that I have a host that supports subdomains, I've finally gotten around to adding subdomain support to LnBlog. And so, the URL of this page has now changed to http://lnblog.skepticats.com/. Thanks to the wonder that is mod_rewrite, the old URLs should continue to function.

And, of course, it goes without saying that subdomain support will be in the nex release of LnBlog. Of course, first I'll have to add a user interface to configure it, but at least the back-end code is working now.

New file writing twists

pageer@skepticats.com (Peter Geer)

It looks like I've got my file permission issues sorted out now. I case you didn't know, I've moved to a new web host and I ended up having some issues with LnBlog.

My previous host ran PHP as an Apache module. In this configuration, andy files PHP creates are owned by the Apache user. Basically, this means that if you want a script to write to the filesystem, you have to disable safe_mode and make everything world-writable, or you have to use FTP. This is the scenario I had in mind when I wrote the NativeFS file writing module for LnBlog.

My new host, however, runs PHP suexec. This means that PHP is running as CGI, not an Apache module, and is running as my regular user account, not the Apache account. Thus, there is no need to worry about file permissions or ownership, because everything "just works."

Well, almost everything. It turns out that the server objects to scripts and directories that are world-writable, throwing an internal server error. This is a good thing as far as security goes. However, the NativeFS module, by default, makes everything world-writable because it was designed for the mod_php scenario. Hence it doesn't work.

Needless to say, I've fixed this problem and deployed it on my site. Basically, I've just added the ability to set the permissions for LnBlog to use when creating files. I just have to work out the configuration interface and then I'll put up a maintenance release.

LnBlog in Linux Format

pageer@skepticats.com (Peter Geer)

I discovered something rather cool this weekend. While browsing through a copy of the June 2006 Linux Format in Barnes & Noble, I found a reference to LnBlog! In fact, LnBlog was featured on the first page of their "Hot Picks" section. I had no idea it was going to be listed, so this was a pleasant surprise for me.

Their write-up provided a pretty good summary and was generally positive. It was a little out of date, in that it covered LnBlog 0.6.4, but that's unavoidable, as they always write these things way ahead of time. The only real criticism the author had was that there is a lack of end-user documentation. I'm working on fixing that, but it's slow going. Now, if there were 36 hours in a day, then it might be another story.

As a point of interest, I was so pleased by this that I actually shelled out the $16 or whatever it was to buy a copy of the magazine. When I showed the column on LnBlog to my wife Sarah, it took several minutes to convince her that I actually wrote the software. (She's obviously not very interested in software.) The thing that convinced her was that the screenshot with the column used the skepticats theme, which includes a picture of our cat Loki in the banner. When she asked, "How did they get a picture of Loki?" and I explained that I put it in that theme because I wrote the program, it finally started to sink in. After that, she thought it was really cool.