May, 14, 2004 archives

i was all ready to write an blog entry about an upcoming release of colobus (my nntp server for ezmlm mailing lists), when i happened to look at one of my terminal windows and notice a very bad rm -rf colobus*. uh, oops.

i’ve recreated the changes (the hard part was writing it the first time), now i just need to do more testing to make sure i really did recreate the changes. putting the 165,478 messages from the mysql general mailing list into the database takes a while.

i also have (and did not accidently delete, at least not yet) a replacement for most of the rest of the bits of the web-based archives that are currently served up by ezmlm-cgi. which for lists.mysql.com, is just the listings — i already replaced the message view with code based on the lists.php.net code.

it handles the encoding of the posts to the japanese users list (unlike the current ezmlm-cgi listings), which is cool, even if i can’t understand it. it also handles that wacky Antwort prefix the germans love so much.

i should really package up the web frontend stuff someday, too. there’s really not much of anything specific about the lists.mysql.com setup to it. it just mimics ezmlm-cgi right now — i need to think more about how i really want it to look and work.

rayg takes a look at some of the php-based alternatives to moveable type. i have to agree with his assessment of wordpress and serendipity. the code is just messy, like most open-source php projects. my impression of textpattern was that it is even messier.

of course, this is mostly an aesthetic judgement. one thing they all have in common is good, and especially good-looking, user interfaces. i suspect that’s more important than the code quality for most bloggers.

(and to be fair, i’ve only looked at version 1.0.2 of wordpress, an older version of s9y, and an early beta of textpattern. they may have all improved.)

i’m still of the roll-my-own blogging tool mentality. it isn’t often that i miss a feature that one of the off-the-shelf packages would give me, and it’s not a large amount of code to hack on for fun. the code for the blogging bits of this site is less than 1000 lines. the code for another blog of mine is less than 100 lines, plus the 936 lines for textile. (it doesn’t supporting comments, though, and does post-by-email instead of having a web form.)

i’ve released version 2.0 of colobus, my nntp server that runs on top of ezmlm archives. there’s more that could be improved, but this at least gets an initial DBI-driven version out there.

i tried to announce the release on freshmeat, but it kept timing out. we’ll see if it takes.