Schinckel.net

Now I’ve (virtually) solved my Comment Spam issue, I’ll look into trackback Spam. Note to self: look at Trackback Validator Plugin over on Trackback Spam Resources. That whole site looks pretty good, too.

I need to see why Blogsome isn’t notifying readers when their comments are moderated. Apparently (according to the Codex) this is just a line or two of code. It would be nice to make a system wide change, but I’ll start with just a notification in my blog template.

I think my simple catchpa is working quite well. I’ve only had one comment through that was Spam, and that was actually a trackback, not a comment. Ditto for comments in moderation. However, I haven’t had too many ‘real’ comments in the last few days, either. I hope there aren’t people who are trying to comment but cannot. I don’t think so, since I seem to be able to comment fine, from IE and Firefox. Love to hear from anyone using this method.

ManOpen is a great idea. Why be limited to viewing man pages in the _Terminal _you are working in, when you can offload it to another window, another application even. Even before this came along, I investigated other solutions, like using groff to generate a PDF, and viewing that (too slow), and starting a new Terminal window and viewing the man page in that. Generally, this would involve a Cmd-N, then man _whatever_. Then I found ManOpen. I blogged about how I had some issues with ManOpen under Tiger, but an update fixed this. What the update didn’t fix, in fact, what it screwed up were some Classic Applications. See, in OS X, Apple decided to use extensions rather than meta-data as the main way of telling if a file is an application or porn. Or any other type of file, for that matter. Which is all well and good if the application has a name that actually ends in .app. But what about older OS9 applications, like Photoshop 5.5. I know, I know, upgrade to CS. Well, we run that too, but PS5.5 runs under Classic, and we kind of need to run under Classic to get decent print quality. Or decent PDF quality and small sizes. So, Adobeâ„¢ Photoshopâ„¢ 5.5, which ends with a .5 used to work. Before ManOpen decided to ‘0wn’ all of the files that end in .5, or .n (where n is any single digit, excluding 0). Which meant that trying to run this program caused ManOpen to, well, open. I didn’t twig this until I had tried as hard as I could to get PS5.5 to actually run itself. File Buddy was showing it as a Classic Application, but the Finder just wouldn’t. The bizarre thing is that I only have ManOpen installed under one user’s ~/Applications, so in theory it shouldn’t affect other users. But for some reason, it changed the owner of all files ending in .5, and Script Editor decided it should try to open it. So, if Google sent you here, the solution is: add .app to the file name. It’s as simple as that…

Editing comments in IE is annoying - until just now I had a width:100%; clause in my StyleSheet, and this somehow caused IE to resize the box every time a character is typed. Now, you lose access to the scrollbar, but it doesn’t do the jumping thing. It actually got me thinking about how to implement WYSIWYG commenting. Instead of typing into a TextArea form, you type into a div. This div doesn’t allow for HTML to be actually typed in, but does have the quicktags. Any HTML code is actually converted to how it would display. Pressing any of the quicktags formats the text automatically. The raw text (actually, the raw HTML) is also stored in a hidden textarea, and this is what is sent to the server. This kills a few birds with one stone:

• Only allows HTML that is ‘approved’ to be typed in.
• Fixes any problems with Safari and inability to find cursor position in textarea (which has been fixed in recent builds of the WebKit, btw).
• Removes the need for a Comment Preview box.

Potential problems that may appear (this may be extended):

• Clicking a buttons removes the selection from the div - no idea where to insert the formatting tags,
• Doesn’t seem to be a way to make just any part of the page editable.

Looking through the Blogsome/WPµ source, I came across a Smarty function {globalvar}. “Righto,” I thought, “I’ll google that, and see what comes up.” My template file was the first thing that did. Okay, what this function does is take a Smarty variable, and make it global in the PHP scope. Used in my template, and most Blogsome ones, it sets the variable $comment to be a global one. I haven’t come up with another good use for it, but it’s nice to know.

For some time, since the XMLRPC file was updated, posting to Blogsome via the XMLRPC interface has been broken. It works, but extraneous slashes are inserted before quotes and apostrophes. I’ve been lucky enough to get my dirty little mitts on the source code, on a test server, and have come up with what may be a fix. The good folks at Blogsome (I think) replaced the dodgy, broken version of XMLRPC.php with one that prevented some problems with a security hole. However, this version of the file came from a more recent WordPress installation. The version of WP-µ that Blogsome uses may not have actually been vulnerable to the problem that the XMLRPC file could have caused, because of this code:

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        // Do some escapes for safety
        $post_title = $wpdb->escape($post_title);
        $post_name = sanitize_title($post_title);
        $post_excerpt = $wpdb->escape($post_excerpt);
        $post_content = $wpdb->escape($post_content);
        $post_author = (int) $post_author;

However, the new XMLRPC file also escapes everything. So everything gets escaped twice, causing the quotes to be double-escaped. So, I replaced the above code with the code from the new version:

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        // Get the basics.
        $post_content    = apply_filters('content_save_pre',   $post_content);
        $post_excerpt    = apply_filters('excerpt_save_pre',   $post_excerpt);
        $post_title      = apply_filters('title_save_pre',     $post_title);
        $post_category   = apply_filters('category_save_pre',  $post_category);
        $post_status     = apply_filters('status_save_pre',    $post_status);
        $post_name       = apply_filters('name_save_pre',      $post_name);
        $comment_status  = apply_filters('comment_status_pre', $comment_status);
        $ping_status     = apply_filters('ping_status_pre',    $ping_status);

My test blog (which isn’t available to the public, as it’s on another server) seems to be coping well with this, I think I’ll publish a heap of entries to it and see how it holds up. I’m hoping that Ronan will be able to have a look over these changes, and hopefully we’ll see the Quote Escape bug gone, for good, very soon! Update: Apparently I didn’t do enough checking. The filters that are called don’t actually exist, so no escaping is done. That will teach me for going off half cocked. I will try to implement the new filters used by this version of the code, but we’ll see.

This isn’t really a full review or comparison, just a few quick notes. I downloaded the demo version of iMediaView Pro, and ran it. I let it import all of my iPhoto library, and was fairly disappointed it didn’t automatically albumize them according to my iPhoto albums. I must say I don’t like the interface nearly as much as iPhoto’s. iPhoto is pretty much a great program, except it’s dog slow whenever you try to do anything. But it’s simple to use, and really has all of the cataloguing features I need right now. I just use a Smart Playlist to list every photo that doesn’t have an album, and create a new album each time I import photos, and add them all to that. Now that iPhoto has folders, I can have a level of hierarchical organisation. And iPhoto has built-in capabilities to view photos by date of creation. If only it wasn’t so. damn. slow.

iTunes Music Store Australia is here. Since you need to sign up to even get access to the free music, I had to enter my Credit Card Number. It didn’t work. Three times. Apparently you need to actually have money in there for it to work.

Apparently, it’s possible to use JavaScript to preload images. checked = new Image(); checked.src = "/images/true.gif"; unchecked = new Image(); unchecked.src = "/images/false.gif"; This is better than doing the CSS trick display:none;, as this doesn’t always preload in every browser.