Anyway, typo 4 definitely appears to be shinier than the last release by a long way. It’s got tags (which I’ve had for a while), a revamped admin interface, better support for draft articles and lots more. It also appears that it’s less inclined to spout reams of garbage into the logs, which is nice.

As usual, please let me know if something is acting up. I’ll do my best to fix it.

A couple of months ago, I saw that people started adding more buttons to their blog posts. “Add to del.icio.us.” “Digg This!” “Reddit?”

Again, all a complete waste of time, and precious page space.

Unfortunately, today I have just witnessed this vile insanity:

I mean, really, what the hell are all those little things? And more to the point, who cares?

Normally, I track bits of software I might want to hack on in a vendor branch in subversion, and use svn_load_dirs.pl to update to new releases. This works extremely well with wordpress at work, for instance.

Sadly, svn_load_dirs.pl couldn’t cope with the typo trunk, as a directory got replaced by a symlink. Ooops. I tried working around it, but eventually, it was easier to give up and start afresh, redoing the changes I’d already made in subversion. I suppose it would have been a lot easier with SVK.

Unfortunately, a number of things haven’t caught up with the latest typo changes. In particular, the origami theme that I was using needs some loving attention. So it’s back to the default theme, “azure” for the moment, until I can spend some time on it.

Also, I couldn’t figure out how to make the google sitemaps patch work, so that’s another “gone for now” feature.

Please let me know if you spot anything else…

Update: Comments now enabled. Sorry about that.

Update#2: I’ve now fixed the comments feed a bit. It turns out that one of the migrations missed out on creating guids for all the comments…

  % ruby script/console production
  >> comments = Comment.find_all
  >> comments.reject { |c| c.guid }.each { |c| c.create_guid; c.save }

Basically, it computes a default value once, inside Ruby, and then caches it. Which is a bit odd, to say the least.

There are a number of open tickets related to this: 2873, 2877, 2257 and probably more. But looking at them, it seems that the problem will be fixed in Rails 1.1, which should be released “soon”.

Meanwhile, I’ll patch this particular instance of Typo to update the time on create. This is what I’ve used, and it seems to be working ok.

Index: app/models/article.rb
===================================================================
--- app/models/article.rb       (revision 727)
+++ app/models/article.rb       (working copy)
@@ -94,6 +94,9 @@
     self.extended_html = HtmlEngine.transform(extended, self.text_filter)
   end

+  # Work around PostgreSQL adaptor (http://dev.rubyonrails.org/ticket/2873)
+  before_create { |art| art.created_at = Time.now }
+
   def self.time_delta(year, month = nil, day = nil)
     from = Time.mktime(year, month || 1, day || 1)

Index: app/models/comment.rb
===================================================================
--- app/models/comment.rb       (revision 727)
+++ app/models/comment.rb       (working copy)
@@ -29,4 +29,7 @@
     self.body_html = HtmlEngine.transform(body, config["comment_text_filter"], [:filter_html])
   end

+  # Work around PostgreSQL adaptor (http://dev.rubyonrails.org/ticket/2873)
+  before_create { |art| art.created_at = Time.now }
+
 end

Thankfully, a simple patch is all that’s required to get things working properly.

Index: app/models/sidebar.rb
===================================================================
--- app/models/sidebar.rb       (revision 724)
+++ app/models/sidebar.rb       (working copy)
@@ -27,7 +27,10 @@
   end

   def active_config
-    self[:active_config]||{}
+    ac = self[:active_config]||{}
+    # XXX Work around a bug in some versions of Ruby / YAML.
+    ac = ac.value if ac.respond_to? "value"
+    ac
   end

   def html_id

I’m so glad that I imported typo into subversion on a vendor branch. It makes this sort of thing a heck of a lot easier.

I should go and file a bug in the typo trac. But I have to admit to not being sure that it’s up and running properly yet…

Meanwhile, Jeremy Keith has given his blog engine a makeover—Everything old is new again. It looks exactly the same as before, but now comes with added searchy goodness. Of course, he used MySQL instead of a real database, but we can forgive small foibles.

My only minor critique is that a permanent redirect should be set up on the RSS feed to direct clients towards the new URL. Something like this in .htaccess should do the trick.

  Redirect permanent /journal/journal.rss  http://adactio.com/journal/rss

I never understood why Apache required you to specify an absolute URL for the destination there. It should be able to work it out if you’ve left the hostname and scheme off…

created_at     | 2006-01-24 00:29:00
updated_at     | 2006-01-24 08:52:04

The updated_at field is correct.

So now I have to figure out which of the many components is defaulting to Eastern Standard Time. Could it be Ruby? Rails? PostgreSQL? Apache? JavaScript? Safari? Who knows, I have to go to work now…

Update: It turns out that HowtoSetDefaultTimeZone has the answer. Put this into config/environment.rb:

ActiveRecord::Base.default_timezone = :utc

Now I just need to find a good blog editor client. It’d be nice if it supported Textile, which I’ve recently been converted to.

Oh, and it’d be really cute if I could figure out how to get tags like pdcawley. I suspect that I need to run the trunk of typo to get that though. Or maybe there’s a plugin somewhere…

All this is just so that I can sensibly run Typo, a rails app. There are other ways to do it, but they’re less preferrable. I could use plain CGI, but that’s dog-slow. I could set up lighttpd, but I’d rather not, seeing as I’m already running Apache for so many other services. I suppose that I could run the standalone script/server tool and use mod_proxy to connect to it. But I that means that I then have to ensure that the process stays up the whole time and gets started correctly. Overall, FastCGI seems like the best choice.

So, today I’ll have a go at plumbing that patch into the FreeBSD port.

WARNING! This version is probably subject to flaws in xmlrpc handling. Delete xmlrpc.php if present in your install. This flaw can allows outside attackers to execute arbitrary commands as the user your web server runs as.

Oh dear. So I won’t be doing that then. But part of the problem is that it’s already fixed in wordpress 1.5 (MySQL edition). Sadly, wordpress-pg is a very inactive project. I know, it’s open source, fix it yourself. But right now, I more or less just want something to work. And I don’t want to delve into scary php if I can help it (I know, that’s rich coming from a Perl programmer). So what are the choices?

I could look at getting MySQL installed and moving over to wordpress proper. Well, I’ve finally gotten around to doing some MySQL at work and I now understand it a little bit, even if I don’t like it that much. But I still have to get the actual database ported from PostgreSQL to MySQL somehow, which seems jolly arduous.

The alternative is to take a look at Typo, a Rails powered blogging engine. The selling points are that it appears to be actively maintained, it’s written in Rails (which I wish to play with) and also that it has a wordpress import script. So I’ve just spent an hour attempting to convert my wordpress-pg install over to typo. And I have to say that it works pretty well. Here’s what I found.

Firstly, I followed the basic install to get typo up and running. I saw Piers complaining about it, but it’s reasonable for me. But I’ve used rails before, so I’m probably not the target market. Anyway, I got to the admin screens and set up a test account pretty quickly. I then ran the import script giving it my old wordpress database name. Needless to say, it didn’t work first time. I had to make these changes to the script:

1. Get rid of all backquotes, that’s some weird MySQLism.
2. I had to change all entry['ID'] to entry['id']. PostgreSQL downcases things.
3. I had to rework the trackback support slightly. Because wordpress-pg is based on wordpress 1.2, trackbacks are stored as a comment that starts with <trackback /> at the beginning. So I had to change comment_type = 'trackback' into comment_content LIKE '<trackback />%'
4. The import script runs in the dev environment by default, but I had been testing in the production environment. This meant I had no users set up in my dev environment. Consequently, I had to patch up the relationships between the users and the articles afterwards (update articles set user_id=1;). Actually, looking at the script, it doesn’t seem to make those links anyway…

The biggest problem was actually getting the script to access the original data. The script assumes that you can do the MySQLish thing of accessing another database by specifying dbname.table. This doesn’t work in PostgreSQL. But, you can take advantage of the fact that PostgreSQL does support schemas, so instead, you can create a schema called wordpress and load a dump of the main database into there. I had to make a few edits to the dumpfile before loading it in though.

1. Get rid of the stuff about plpgsql at the top. I don’t use it.
2. Add CREATE SCHEMA wordpress and SET search_path = wordpress, public, pg_catalog.
3. Comment out all the ALTER foo SET OWNER TO wordpress lines. You have to import it as the typo user and don’t want that changing behind your back.

After the import you can just run DROP SCHEMA wordpress CASCADE to clean up.

After that, I now have a working blog with all my old content. Hurrah! Not simple, but not too difficult either.

Now before I get this main blog converted over, I just need to work out how to run FastCGI scripts from Apache, something I haven’t done before. And then I’ll be away, and I can uninstall wordpress-pg.