Posted by alex
on February 20, 2003
To prepare for the impending redesign of my sites, I started to remove some rather silly things I had grafted onto these pages. The top referer links have gone, and I also removed the mt-refsearch stuff, mainly because this defeats the cacheability of these pages.
And really, the referer stuff can just as well be put into a CGI, like the Comments and TrackBack things.
You know you’ve achieved perfection in design, not when you have nothing more to add, but when you have nothing more to take away.
–Antoine-Marie-Roger de Saint-Exupery
So I am currently looking for things to take away 
Posted by alex
on February 13, 2003
I just finished a rewrite of the mapping program that I used to switch to more google-friendly URLs. Now it no longer needs MySQL installed. Instead, it uses the MT Perl API itself to get the new filename.
As an added bonus, the new URL format is no longer hardcoded, but is taken from the file template that you set in the blog configuration.
UPDATE: And this time, I also link to it…
Posted by alex
on February 07, 2003
I think, every computer user, or at least, every one that will ever come into contact with admins, tech support, or just people with a clue, should have to take a madatory course: “Error Reporting 101″
And some might even need “Understanding And Answering Easy Questions 105″ and “Following The Fuckin Instructions 109″.
Maybe they just confuse me with a clairvoyant, but my crystal ball is broken. So I need a bit more info than “It doesn’t work” and “It still doesn’t work”. And if I ask “What did you do?” and “Was there an error?”, that’s not too much to ask, is it? I mean, you were there. You experienced it first hand.
Oh, and for some people “Reading The Clock 110″ might be useful, too. Because, if you were told, that I am in the office between 6:30 am and 3pm, don’t send an email at 3:55pm, asking if I might be able to fix it today. I am good, but time travel is still out of my league.
OK, now it’s back to squeezing some meaning out of this gibberish that is bug reports.
TGIF
Posted by alex
on February 02, 2003
Sam Ruby has put up a test entry that can be commented via email. Adding something like this to MT shouldn’t be too hard. Now I know what I’ll be doing next weekend 
Posted by alex
on February 01, 2003
Since I couldn’t find a decent (for me) desktop blogging client for Movable Type for Linux, I have decided to make it possible to blog from my favourite application: mutt
To add some security to the script, it only posts entries that have a good GnuPG signature, and even then only if the fingerprint of the key used to sign is allowed to post. And signing emails with gpg is a snap with mutt.
By adding custom headers to the mail, you can even set the category of the entry and ping TrackBack URLs.
The script takes the value of the X-MT-Category header, and if that matches the name of an existing category, this is set as the primary category for that entry. Unfortunately, this category doesn’t show up on the main index after the script rebuilds the entry, even though it does show up in the admin section and after a manual rebuild. Maybe someone with a better understanding of the MT Perl API can shed some light on this…Kevin Shay found the reason for this, it had to do with MT doing some caching. Disabling this caching for the rebuild removes this problem
And pinging TrackBack URLs happens via the X-MT-Ping header. This header can appear multiple times, and each URL gets pinged.
It’s still the first version of the script, so it’s still a little rough. I have been running it under qmail and vpopmail, and to get the script to rebuild the entry, I had to make blog directory writable to the vpopmail group. It works, but if someone has a more elegant approach to this, I am all ears.
This script uses a few CPAN modules:
- GnuPG
- MIME::Parser
- Mail::Header
- MIME::QuotedPrint
And here’s the code: mail2blog.pl. Use at your own risk, if it eats your server, sets your house on fire or lets your hair fall out, I will say “I told you so”