Now with 27 percent more pretties

Posted by alex on October 17, 2006

It’s all about the branding, you know?

That’s why all my blogs (both of them) now share the same theme (Scribbish), even though they run on two completely different engines.

To get you own WP-blog all pretty-like, you can grab ScribbishWP. You won’t regret it. :)

Now with even more mod_rewrite-fu

Posted by alex on October 11, 2006

Since I felt kind of bad about breaking old URLs, I dug a little in the mod_rewrite docs and came up with a solution that should make the old URLs working again. (as if anybody cared…) :)

Facelift

Posted by alex on June 17, 2003

For the moment, I went back to the default MT design, because, let’s face it, it looks much better than the old white design. And it’s a good starting point for yet another redesign.

WaXPoetYk 1

Posted by alex on June 14, 2003

This is what I have been hacking on lately:
waxpoetyk.png
A new client for MovableType, written in Python using the wxPython library (which explains the atrocious spelling of the name).
It’s far from finished, but it can already post to a blog. But before I publish it, I want to get the preview functionality going and give it all the functionality of the “Post to MT Weblog” bookmarklet (allowing comments, allowing trackbacks, text formatting).

Updated mail2blog

Posted by alex on April 22, 2003

I’ve just added the fix for RFC3156 conformance to the mail2blog script, that Reverend Jim proposed to make it work with Evolution and Exim.

Since I have some free time, I think I’ll look into adding image handling capabilities to the script, that sounds like a neat idea.

Updated RewriteMap script 3

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

Now that’s a nifty idea

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 :-)

Blogging via mail, securely 18

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” :-)

Multi-Dollar MT hacking

Posted by alex on January 01, 2003

Actually, it doesn’t take a million dollar authoring app, just a few minutes hacking away at CMS.pm

phil ringnalda dot com: Five dollar bookmarklet

OK, this sounds interesting. So interesting in fact, that I just implemented it and will now test it right away.

Making MovableType play nice with umlauts 6

Posted by alex on December 22, 2002

Since I am using Anders’ tips for archiving MovableType with my german language blog, I noticed a small flaw in the dirify directive. If there are any umlauts in the title, they get simply discarded, leaving behind rather mutilated looking filenames.
Since that can’t be good for the Googlejuice, I have added a new function, convert_umlauts, that changes them to their ASCII equivalents.
If anybody is interested, here’s the patch