Blosxom

For those following this blog, note that I’ve changed the canonical site name from blog.hecker.org to frankhecker.com. Any links and feed URLs referencing the previous domain name will still work for the foreseeable future, but if and when you have time you may want to update your bookmark list, RSS newsreaders, and related information to reflect the new name. A little history by way of background: I was around when the Internet was first being commercialized, and I had the opportunity to register hecker.com for myself if I really wanted to. However I passed because I didn’t have a server to associate with it and I thought I needed to be running an actual server in order to register the name (though I’m not sure that was the case even then). When I finally got around to having a personal server in the late 1990s I found that hecker.com had already been taken by a company that registered thousands of surname domains so that they could offer a shared domain service in which multiple people could have their own personal subdomains under a top-level domain: jane.smith.com, john.smith.com, and so on. So I settled on the next best thing and registered hecker.org instead for use as my primary domain, at the same time registering frankhecker.com (as well as the .org and .net variants) to prevent anyone else from getting 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UPDATE 2023-03-27: This page is obsolete, as it refers to a prior version of this blog.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. This post introduces the Blosxom plugin “extensionless.” Ever since reading the essay “Cool URIs don’t change” I’ve wanted to change my web site to conform to some of its recommendations, including the recommendation to omit file extensions (e.g., “.html") on URIs. Unfortunately standard Blosxom requires that a file extension be present in a URI for an individual entry (e.g., http://www.example.com/foo.html) to distinguish it from a URI for a category (e.g., http://www.example.com/foo). How to fix this? ...

UPDATE 2023-03-27: This page is obsolete, as it refers to a prior version of this blog.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 I originally put up my blog one of the major things lacking was support for comments and TrackBacks. After looking at the various alternatives (the writeback plugin, the writebackplus plugin, and so on) I decided to embark on a complete rewrite of the writeback plugin in order to support my particular requirements for a comments system. After much struggle I created an initial version of my feedback plugin for publication and use on my site; since that time I’ve upgraded the plugin and incorporated bug fixes suggested by various people. ...

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 recently experienced a strange problem with the Atom feed on my weblog. My weblog server is running on US Eastern time as the basic time zone, but the story dates in the Atom feed should be expressed in UTC/GMT; the atomfeed plugin has code that supposedly should do any necessary conversions. On my local test blog (running under OS X 10.3 using Perl 5.8.1) this worked fine, but on my real blog (running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 using Perl 5.8.0) the dates in the Atom feed were incorrect; they were five hours earlier than what they should be, suggesting that they didn’t get converted to UTC/GMT. After some investigation this turned out to be due to non-portable code in the atomfeed plugin. ...

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 use the seemore plugin by Todd Larason to show only excerpts of entries on my main blog page, index pages for categories, and archive pages, while displaying the entire article on an individual entry’s page. It’s worked well, with one exception: When I created my RSS and Atom feeds I wanted the feeds to contain the full text of all entries, for the convenience of people using news readers. (Many of these applications display article text directly in the reader, removing the need to open a browser window to read the article.) ...

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 using the entries_cache_meta plugin by Jason Thaxter, mainly for the convenience of specifying the modification date within the entry file. After a while I decided I’d like to also use its “meta” capability, i.e., the ability to specify arbitrary variables in the entry header along with the modification time, e.g., ...

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 previously blogged about my canonicaluri plugin that checks to see whether the requested URI is in the canonical form for the type of page being requested, and if necessary does a browser redirect to the canonical form of the URI. However the canonicaluri plugin may be overkill for some people, for example, it presumes use of the extensionless plugin, so that canonical URIs for individual entries do not have file extensions for the default flavour. A simpler alternative to the canonicaluri plugin is the slashredir plugin, which only enforces proper usage regarding trailing slashes. ...

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 “official” atomfeed plugin does not generate valid feeds for the current version (0.3) of the Atom specification because the output does not have a “modified” element for the feed as a whole, just “modified” elements for each story. Obviously the modification date/time for the feed can be interpreted as the date/time modified of the most recent story, so then it’s just a matter of generating the proper output for the MODIFIED tags. ...

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 a previous post I discussed the general problem of validating and caching dynamic content. In order to implement the strategy outlined in that post I decided to create a new version of the lastmodified plugin originally created by Bob Schumaker. The lastmodified plugin was a good base to build on; however it didn’t do exactly what I wanted to do, and hence I couldn’t resist trying to improve on 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. 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. ...