Maybe the only productive thing I’ve done recently is write Blosxom plugins. For this I apologize to the world and to myself.

Today, I’ve hacked the increasingly unavailable better_title 2.0b by Tony Williams to work a little bit, well, better. The changes I’ve made include:

• more reliably gets the title of individual entry (tolerates \W characters in filename)
• handles date URLs where month names (as opposed to numbers) are used
• only the top folder in the path is displayed, and it is capitalized to emulate a human-comprehensible category
• the plugin should work with $file_extensions other than txt
• the default settings were changed for a more standard appearance

Apologies to Mr. Williams. Download worse_title 0.1.

Writing these plugins is seeming more and more futile. typo simultaneously appears absurdly bare-bones and deliciously full-featured. It’s only a matter of time, I’m afraid.

As noted, I’m addicted to Flickr.

For this reason, I have hacked together a Blosxom plugin based on syndicated that lets you put a few recent photos from your photostream onto your flavour templates. It caches nicely and is quite flexible. It is currently hard-coded, however, to display the “square” image size and won’t deviate from that. If this becomes a problem for you, please comment.

To get up and running with flickr, find the RSS feed for your photostream (just click the link in the lower-right of the page on Flickr) and paste the URL into the appropriate place in the script. Configure a few other options if you like (including the HTML rendering of your photostream), and put $flickr::photos where you’d like your photographs to appear in your header or footer flavour files. For more information, see perldoc flickr.

At the risk of ending these posts monotonously: With no further ado, I present flickr 0.1 (it would be wise to option-click).

A very slight change to syndicated more safely preserves HTML entities with the goal of keeping your site valid. You know the drill.

Hold on tight to your lawn chairs, lumbar supports, and antisneakers, because there’s planet-shattering news about this here blog. We’ve finally been indexed.

That’s right, dear reader, just go ahead and Google for Capra hircus: we’re right there at spot number three.

Perhaps I should not become so excited about these things.

I can’t help but suspect that the registration of the caprahircus.ws name had something to do with Google’s change of heart. There are, after all, a positively astronomical 44 pages indexed on the domain name. A search for Pygmy Software still returns nothing on the official site, but the first result is a 302 redirect to the home page. Take that, Pygmy Computer Systems (thanks, nofollow).

So ends a saga.

I made a few changes to syndicated in version 0.3 and released it silently, but some changes kindly implemented by Katriel Traum necessitated a slightly louder release of version 0.4.

I honestly can’t remember exactly what was fixed in 0.3, but everything works now how it ought to (as far as I know). Katriel added some functionality for using the Encode module to help translate encoded feeds into the appropriate format for your blog.

Perhaps you would like to download the plugin.

Just recently, I switched from my the interminably irritating and downright inadequate 2MHost to the comparatively angelic Bloghosts. I was more than a little self-congratulatory on the matter.

Scant days after the DNS changeover, Bloghosts displayed the following message:

All servers will be monitored and remain online until January 1, 2005. At this time each server will be shut down. Henceforth orders for new service will not be accepted and current customers will not have their credit cards charged for these final two months. We regret this decision but after putting our best resources to work it has become obvious that the damage caused by the corruption is irreversible.

Calamity. Uproar.

I spent a few weeks on the Bloghosts servers, alternating between stumbling around in a pit of hopeless, bleak despair, musing about the moral nature of the universe, and playing scrabble against a team of augmented furbies. I considered hosting all of my sites in my closet on a Radius 81/110 that is rarely used, but this plan was thwarted once I realized that I’d need to do something tricky to get it on my network (and thus to the Internet). I have an AAUI-to-RJ45 Ethernet transceiver, but such adaptors cannot, apparently, communicate with 10/100BaseT equipment, which constitutes my entire home network.

One day, exploring BugMeNot’s site for some reason or another, I noticed their “hosted by” link to NearlyFreeSpeech.net (“Not free. Close enough.”). I was immediately floored. Hold on tight, squint your eyes, or put your shoes on. Do what you need to do to brace yourself, because these are their rates, in U.S. dollars:

Bandwidth: $1/GB
Storage: 1¢/MB/month

Don’t pick yourself off the floor yet, because they also don’t place any limits on the number of sites that may be linked to one debit account or the number of domain aliases that may point to any one site. They have stellar — nearly instantaneous, in all my experience — support, and seem to have real dedication to their service.

On a darker note, I’ve had no luck whatsoever in requesting a refund from Bloghosts, which they seem to generously offer on their site. Jace does not seem to be responding to any email. I may be out the $30.

In summary, we here at the pygmysoftware.com domain have a new home, and it is glorious. Have a good day and do not worry.

Just a day or two ago, the pygmysoftware.com domain switched to my new hosting account at Bloghosts from my old one at 2MHost. This domain includes Outer Heaven, Capra Hircus itself, the somewhat stale site of the Persons of Unusual Valor, Postings, and, of course, Pygmy Software’s site.

One might liken this to a breath of cool, fresh air.

The nameservers changed unexpectedly quickly, causing just a few hiccups. The most annoying among these, of course, was another flooding of LiveJournal “friends” pages.

To-do: Ask the folks at 2MHost to kindly shove it.

In news that will interest a completely negligible section of the world’s population, I have completed version 0.2 of syndicated, my first and only plugin for Blosxom. The following changes have been made, ranked in somewhat arbitrary order of magnitude.

• Multiple feeds. Several syndicated feeds can now be configured instead of just the one.
• Parses HTML entities. Entities are encoded in XML (and thus, RSS), so they need to be decoded. This uses HTML::Entities.
• Can use curl. syndicated has used LWP::Simple in the past, but it can now be configured to use curl instead.

Download and enjoy.

Capra hircus is now feedback-friendly once more. The comments plugin for Blosxom has been installed, configured, and hacked. comments itself is a modification of Rael Dornfest’s own writeback plugin (which Capra used before), hacked to add comments and a little more efficiency.

That, of course, wasn’t good enough for Capra hircus’ high standards. comments has been hacked to protect email addresses from spam, to help you fill out mailto:s and http://s on the posting form, to filter out most HTML, to get rid of the empty-link problem, and to log IPs. Using a combination of manual text-editing and some automation provided by comments, I converted all my old comments (which used a dysfunctional and incompatible format derived from the writeback one).

I’ve also added an invitation to the bottom of articles on the rss91 feed (which, non-intuitively, is an RSS 1.0 feed) to comment on this site, because I and my server logs are relatively certain the only entity that reads that feed is the LiveJournal syndication bot.

Also, to continue the tradition of telling you about things you didn’t need to know, I implemented a quick flat RSS .91 feed of recent comments in order to further my progression toward omniscience.

Thank you and enjoy.

You probably didn’t notice, but the world just changed again.

Capra hircus, your friendly neighborhood weblog, was redesigned today. The effect on the overall appearance is minimal. A few subtle layout changes happened (collect them all and win a really dull prize), and the sidebar on the right is hidden by default (show it by clicking “menu” in the upper-right).

The referral box is gone. It was just one long, pointless battle against spam.

Trackbacks are gone. Nobody uses them anymore. Comments are temporarily absent. I might write a new system for comments; I might use somebody else’s.

So the content-type was going to be application/xhtml+xml. Then I found out IE hates standards (what?). Then I patched Blosxom to only give you application/xhtml+xml if your browser accepted it. Sadly, Safari transmits Accept: */* just like IE (which doesn’t, in fact, support the new MIME type), so the vast majority of readership would see no change. And, to further complicate things, Mozilla-based browsers, in my testing, didn’t distinguish between XML and XHTML (although the purported explicitly to accept the more restrictive MIME type) and displayed useless rammed-together content or an error and the source code. So, the content-type remains archaic: text/html. Apologies.

Page titles are now far less informative. This might not change.

The main upshot is that the source code is a whole bunch more relaxed. Was it worth the effort? Almost.