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UPDATE 2023-03-27: This page is obsolete, as it refers to a prior version of this blog. However, it may be of historical interest. One of the things I enjoy about setting up my own blog with the Blosxom software is learning about the deep details of web protocols and formats that I’ve never worried about before. (This might have been the case if I’d used another blogging system, but the hackable nature of Blosxom inspires, nay, almost demands it.) Lately I’ve been educating myself about HTTP conditional GET requests and validation and caching of dynamically-generated content. ...

UPDATE 2023-03-27: This page is obsolete, as it refers to a prior version of this blog. However, it may be of historical interest. I’ve done a lot of work related to software licensing as part of the Mozilla relicensing project and when I worked at CollabNet. As a result of enduring endess wrangling about licensing terms I’ve been put off complex licensing schemes, and prefer to make my own works available under very liberal terms. ...

UPDATE 2023-03-27: This page is obsolete, as it refers to a prior version of this blog. However, it may be of historical interest. When stock Blosxom sees a URL that doesn’t correspond to an existing entry or list of entries, it simply puts up a “normal” page (i.e., using the standard heat and foot templates for that flavour) that doesn’t have any actual content. I really don’t like this behavior, and thus I decided to try out the emptymessage plugin created by Fletcher Penney. Unfortunately I wasn’t entirely happy with its behavior either, and so I decided to patch it. ...

UPDATE 2023-03-27: This page is obsolete, as it refers to a prior version of this blog. However, it may be of historical interest. As noted in a previous post, I am a big fan of the Markdown text-to-HTML conversion tool. However, nothing’s perfect. I already discussed a bug involving link ids, and I subsequently found one other reason to patch Markdown, for sites like mine that generate both HTML 4.01 Strict and XML pages (an Atom feed in my case). ...

UPDATE 2023-03-27: This page is obsolete, as it refers to a prior version of this blog. However, it may be of historical interest. In creating my blog I wanted to be able to go beyond plain text entries but avoid having to hand-code HTML. I looked at various schemes for marking up plain text to indicate the presence of links, ordered and unordered lists, preformatted text, etc. In particular I was familar with Textile and Pod from having used them in my Blosxom annotations project. (I didn’t look at all of these, but some other entrants in the “plain text markup” space include ReStructured Text, Texturize, and the various implementations of text markup for Wikis.) ...

UPDATE 2023-03-27: This page is obsolete, as it refers to a prior version of this blog. However, it may be of historical interest. I’ve been investigating using the Blosxom weblog application for my personal blog, and felt disadvantaged by my lack of knowledge of Perl (the language in which Blosxom was written). I began making detailed notes while I was reading through the Blosxom code (blosxom.cgi); my note taking quickly got out of hand, and here are the results, for anyone who’s interested: ...

UPDATE 2023-03-27: This page is obsolete, as it refers to a prior version of this blog. However, it may be of historical interest. If you’d like to receive full-text articles from this site as they are published, you can subcribe to one or more of the following feeds, in the formats indicated; simply cut and paste the URLs into your feed reader of choice. The Atom feeds are preferred; I maintain the RSS feeds only for older news aggregators that are not yet Atom-enabled. ...

UPDATE 2023-03-27: This page is obsolete, as it refers to a prior version of this blog. However, it may be of historical interest. In using Markdown I found one problem, one I’m surprised hasn’t been reported before. (I looked through the Markdown mailing list archive briefly, but didn’t see anything on this; perhaps people consider the current behavior a feature, not a bug?) I make extensive (really, almost exclusive) use of reference-style links, and noticed problems when I word-wrapped my paragraphs, so that the resulting text looked something like the following: ...

I have published a new draft 5 of the proposed Mozilla CA certificate policy. For detailed line-by-line changes from the previous draft please see my posting in the netscape.public.mozilla.crypto newsgroup (aka the mozilla-crypto mailing list). (Note that I have not yet updated the accompanying FAQ, but will try to do so in the next few days. Unfortunately for various reasons I will have less free time during the holiday season than I would normally, so I can’t commit to getting this done right away.) ...

UPDATE 2023-03-27: This page is obsolete, as it refers to a prior version of this blog. However, it may be of historical interest. The basic principles I tried to follow in creating the this site were as follows: The site should be entirely text-based, with minimal or no use of graphics. All web pages on the site should validate as HTML 4.01 Strict. All web pages on the site should be accessible using URIs that hide the details of the particular content type or page generation mechanism associated with the page. The site should be a transparent upgrade from my previous site (created a few years ago), so that all previous URLs should continue to work. The following sections expand on these points: ...