A CNN crew was apparently in Kansas briefly this week. They seemed surprised to be hit by tornadoes, and then by a 5,000-acre prairie fire.
I started smelling smoke yesterday evening, went outside to investigate. I didn’t see or hear any fire. I figured some grassland must be burning again, and checked on it every couple of hours.
Turns out it was a good 30 miles away.
The funny thing is that CNN doesn’t seem to have ever filed a report from Kansas about this; they just posted a blog story.
Thanks to some assistance from Garvin (lead Serendipity developer), it looks like the bug that Planet dislikes so intensely is indeed the <slash:comments> tag. I don’t believe this is a bug in Serendipity bug rather in Planet.
(There is still, IMHO, a pubDate bug in Serendipity, but it appears to be unrelated)
So, the dupes you were seeing from me really are gone now. I hope.
The fix is to edit the file templates/default/feed_2.0.tpl and remove the line that provides the <slash:comments> tag.
BTW, seems that Planet Haskell also ran afoul of this.
It seems that some of my posts are appearing on Planet Debian multiple times, and others not at all. I think the problem is a strange combination between subtle bugs in Planet and Serendipity. The SF bug report for Serendipity is here. I think the workaround should fix this.
Either that, or Planet is somehow taking offense as the <slash:comments> tag that Serendipity is putting in there.
Sorry about that — hopefully it is fixed now.
A couple of days ago, I mentioned the Register article about the Tuttle, OK city manager that threatened to call the FBI on a Linux developer because his webhost misconfigured their server.
Now The Register has a great followup. Apprently people all over are justifiably upset at the city manager.
There are also some great reader comments over at The Register.
Also, that city manager has removed his e-mail address from tuttle-ok.gov. But fortunately, we all remember that it’s citymgr@cityoftuttle.org.
After my mail reader comparison, I’ve been fortunate enough to have a few mail server troubles. So here, to help you with your mail server decisions, is my mail server comparison.
Well, finally! I’ve switched to Serendipity!
The best part: comment spam blocking that works. So to those of you that had trouble commenting on this site… try again. It should just work! (And I’m sorry you had to put up with the hassle so long.)
Serendipity is a very nice system. I’m glad I chose it. And the support from Garvin and the others has been great too.
I’m running 1.0beta2 and have found a few bugs, but nothing serious.
As I mentioned before, I wrote a tool in Haskell to convert posts, comments, and categories from Drupal to Serendipity. If you use darcs, you can fetch it with:
darcs get --partial http://darcs.complete.org/unmaintained/blogcvt
The darcs-impaired may download a tarball.
I wrote the other day that I was considering Serendipity, and had a few concerns about it.
Those concerns have now been pretty well resolved.
I also looked at WordPress. It looked like it had more features, but the whole lack of a central plugin store bothered me. I’d have to scour all over the net to find plugins, and half of them are just on a random person’s blog. Very few mentioned support for WordPress 2.0; most were for 1.5.
Then I looked at anti-spam options in both. The major anti-spam plugin for WordPress had two big strikes against it, in my mind: it’s not Free software, and it doesn’t work with PostgreSQL.
I am really ticked off by webapps that only support MySQL. There is no reason not to support PostgreSQL (especially when WordPress itself does).
So I am going with Serendipity.
Now, I have to write a Drupal to Serendipity conversion tool.
I downloaded Serendipity 1.0beta2 over the weekend and started trying it out.
My initial thought after setting it up was: *wow*. It really is incredibly easy to set up. No hand-editing of config files. No weird menus or scattering things all about. The whole system speaks of elegance and good coding practices. Except the fact that it ships some files world-writable in the tarball.
As I looked at it some more, I noticed a few problems, though. I submitted bugs or feature requests to the project as appropriate, and am including links to them here:
Despite these problems, this looks like a very strong contender. And I was using a beta.
Next up for testing: WordPress.
I just read a story on The Register entitled Oklahoma city threatens to call FBI over “renegade” Linux maker. Quite hilarious.
Apparently Jerry Taylor, city manager for Tuttle, Oklahoma, noticed that the city’s webpage wasn’t working right. He got the default “test page” for the Apache webserver on CentOS.
Instead of calling the hosting company, he sent a series of vicious emails to CentOS, even threatening to call the FBI. The CentOS folks really went out of their way to help this guy — he was not even their customer. And he repaid them by saying they should have helped him sooner.
Of course, there was the obligatory comment about being computer literate: “I am computer literate! I have 22 years in computer systems engineering and operation. Now, can you tell me how to remove ‘your software’ that you acknowledge you provided free of charge? I consider this ‘hacking.'”
The Register story is hilarious, and the original discussion even more so because it includes a full transcript of the event. Favorite quote (to the city manager):
If you will not let me help you, or at least talk to someone who knows what Linux is, then you will look like an idiot.
Your choice.
Should anyone wish to write to the city manager of Tuttle, OK, to complain about his outrageous behavior, his e-mail address is citymgr@cityoftuttle.org. Assuming they have figured out how to properly configure e-mail.
He’s probably not worth his $63k salary and with a personality like this almost certainly isn’t giving his employees the “feeling that we’re ‘working together'” (see that link).
Sigh. Why do people hire a guy like this in the first place?
I’ve been using Drupal for this blog for most of its life. However, I’m starting to be quite annoyed by several things:
So I’m planning to switch to something else. Something where blogging will be fun again, without all the hassle of tracking down spam. It looks like either WordPress or Serendipity, and I’m leaning towards Serendipity for now.