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UPDATE 2023-03-27: This page is obsolete, as it refers to a prior version of this blog.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UPDATE 2023-03-27: This page is obsolete, as it refers to a prior version of this blog.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.) ...