I’ve added some new stuff tonight. Now, you can use any of the smilies supported by WordPress on my blog (I shamelessly borrowed the graphics and related material out of WordPress so that SAFARI could do this ). I borrowed JavaScript code from Alex King's wp_grins so that you can simply click the smilies of your choice below the comment box.

You'll also notice a new "others said here" section on the side (to be distinguished from the old "others said" section that is now known as "others said elsewhere"). The two links there will take you to a "forum view" that shows the blog posts that have the most comments and the most recently commented blog posts. The latter differs from typical "recent comments" sections on blogs in that it does not list every new comment individually, but instead shows the posts that have been commented on, rather like the way phpBB shows topics that have new replies. This insures that one busy post won't hide activity on less busy posts; this is not usually a problem, but keep in mind I'm designing SAFARI to work on bigger things than asisaid. The inspiration of using a forum view for this comes from Kevin's blog from long ago that was based on phpBB -- I always liked that concept.

Give the new features a whirl and let me know what you think.

Awhile back, I made the decision to retain the UNIX time stamp system of dating within SAFARI, which I had started using when I first created SAFARI to be used without a database. The UNIX time stamp (seconds from the UNIX epoch of January 1, 1970) is easy to process in Perl, which makes it attractive to work with.

Big problem: this means more of the date processing must be done after a given piece of information is fetched from the db. If I was using the MySQL date-time field format (2005-03-13 16:12:30), I could do some processing within the SQL queries and therefore streamline things. Therefore, I’m going to undertake switching SAFARI over to this, right now. Unfortunately, SAFARI’s sandbox that I built shares the database with the live asisaid copy of SAFARI, so while the code changes won’t go into effect over here until I have things working, some things might behave oddly.

Update (2005-Mar-13 18:50): All done. Now on to fixing things to use my time zone (central) rather than UTC.

Update 2 (2005-Mar-13 19:45): The time zone is now appropriate too. That was a bit more difficult. As it turned out, I had accidentally set my code to store posting dates in Eastern Time (well, or more properly, to use the server’s localtime(), which I have set to Eastern for the sake of matching other U.S. servers, despite the fact that it is in the Central time zone). So all posts from the old program were in UTC/GMT, but all after around noon on December 24, 2004 were in EST. Therefore, I put together this little SQL query:

SELECT cid,FROM_UNIXTIME(UNIX_TIMESTAMP(gmt)+18000) FROM uninet_comments WHERE (‘2004-12-24 12:00’ <= gmt)

Afterwards, I exported the resulting output and did some regex magic to turn the insert statements into update statements:

s/INSERT INTO `uninet_comments` VALUES ((.*?), ‘(.*?)’);/UPDATE uninet_comments SET gmt=’$2’ where cid=’$1’;/sgi;

Finally, I took the those SQL commands, fed them to MySQL. Rinse and repeat for the articles table.

After that, it was a simple matter to add the new time zone adjustments within SAFARI to take the GMT time information and convert it to Central Standard Time (UTC-6:00). Now, I just need to figure out how to implement daylight savings time support, so that posts and comments posted during DST will be UTC-5:00 without making standard time posts and comments switch as well.

I’d like this document to serve as a beginning of a conversation on improving pinging mechanisms in blogware. If you bear with me through this and decide you like the idea, please consider passing this link along so that real change may become possible in the near future.

After spending the last few days implementing Trackback and Pingback clients and servers for SAFARI (which I am presently searching for a new name for), I’ve come to the conclusion that both systems are woefully annoying to work with and need updating. I’ve come to the conclusion that Trackback is far easier to work with, but it too is flawed.

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I believe I have pingback and trackback fully implemented (both the client and server). Both work against my test implementations of themselves, as well as against my test WordPress installation. That said, testing on the same server doesn’t provide all the variables that could be involved. Thus, I am asking anyone who would be willing to please pingback or trackback against this entry — especially if you use MovableType (but even if you don’t!). Five juicy asisaid points are yours for the taking if you do so, just for making me feel better about my code.

Note: I have it setup so that it only accepts one trackback/pingback from a given entry, so if you try to do both a pingback and a trackback, you’ll find it only accepts whichever one is sent first. Also, I have everything in place for automatic detection of both types of pings, however, if your blogware needs to be manually fed a Trackback URL, you’ll find one on the permalink’ed version of this page.

Thanks for your help! And thanks, once again, to Christopher, Josiah and Eduardo for their volunteering on my last call for help. Without the help of you three, I may not have gotten this far so soon.

Since some of the pings went through, I’m leaving the links to the places I tried to ping below. I have successfully pinged CNET News.com and Josiah’s blog (in two different entries by accident — I am sorry Josiah!). I have not successfully pinged Christopher’s blog, however. I thought I had, but due to a complex set of events that I shall explain sometime soon, I did not do so last night. Further attempts today seem to reveal something odd — WIT’s copy of WordPress refuses to acknowledge that my posts link to a given entry, therefore making it impossible to do a proper pingback.

All else being equal, you’d think sending pingbacks to two WordPress blogs would return the same results, but for some reason it doesn’t. I suspect that, for whatever reason, Christopher’s server cannot connect to mine. Since inability to connect (or the returning of a 500 Internal Server Error “thanks” to mod_security) seems to be the only thing that invokes the error at hand in the case of my page, that seems to be the only thing I can figure. It could be more layers of security getting in the way perhaps, I’ll have to try turning of mod_security again. To provide another view, I copied out WordPress’ pingback code into a standalone PHP script and placed that on ibiblio.org — it, like Josiah’s copy of WordPress, returns a successful code. We’ll see what I find in the next few days.

Anyway, interesting stuff, I suppose. It might seem more so, tomorrow.

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I’m trying to finish my pingback/trackback client implementation for SAFARI. I set up a copy of WordPress to use as a test target, but it isn’t working right (my WordPress installation can’t seem to locate the test entries I posted on it). Would any asisaid reader using WordPress be willing to allow me to send some test pings/trackbacks to an old blog pos on your site? It would be a lot easier if I was testing against a WP installation that I knew was in working order.

Thanks in advance! I’ll provide extra asisaid points — how about 30? — for willing victi… volunteers.

Here’s a question for my readers. Does your blogware do pingbacks, trackbacks or both? I’m trying to decide how to implement such things in SAFARI. It looks like trackback auto-discovery is fairly clunky, and, if I understand Six Apart’s design of the same, it merely looks for an XML/RDF tag embedded inside the page — something I believe would not work on, for example, What in Tarnation!?!?!?!, which, to the best of my knowledge, seems to be lacking any XML/RDF information embedded on the article pages.

To continue to examine Christopher's blog (hope you don't mind, Christopher), I do see that he has a properly implemented < link > tag for Pingback auto-discovery on his site. Given this, I suppose SAFARI could automatically pingback every link mentioned in a post, but only trackback if explicitly told to. Of course, the other question is whether I should pingback to sites I also trackback. My dear reader, how does your blogware work on this matter?

Color me confused and boggled about this element of blogware implementation.

Update: OK, so Christopher's blog does have RDF encoded on the front page. But I haven't figured out how to properly find that if I link to a permalink rather than the front page. And that still leaves the question of whether I should pingback and trackback the same link. So, your insight is still much appreciated.

Update 2: It helps to examine more than one blog. As it turns out, Pressed and Ed both have proper embedded RDF information on the article pages. Kevin does not, but then again, I don't think his blog supports trackbacks now that he's moved off of WordPress.

So Christopher, straiten up and get trackback RDF information embedded in your article pages -- it's the WITty thing to do. And, no, don't bother looking in my blog's HTML, I haven't implemented trackbacks yet.

Leave comments about how pingbacks and trackbacks work for your blogware below... I'll be very grateful for your help.

Welcome to SAFARI 2, codename “Alexandra.” The more I use SAFARI 2, the more convinced I become it is really still alpha quality rather than beta. Here is what is still broken, ordered in two lists, one that contains “soon to be fixed” stuff and one that contains later stuff.

Soon

• RSS will return in the next few days.
• Lingering display problems will be corrected.
• Blogroll will return ASAP.
• Topics will work again.
• Problems in admin panel will be fixed.
• “Remember Me” cookie for comment will function.
• Friendly URL’s will return (in backwards compatible way, no need to change your links to any post on asisaid, it will work again ASAP).
• Posting a comment pages will retain look of asisaid.

Later

• Proper rendering of trackbacks.
• Trackback support.
• Pinging of Weblogs.com/Blogrolling.com.
• Tons of other stuff.

If you see problems on these pages, please let me know in the comments below so that I can try to put it on the list of things to fix.

This will likely be my last post before Christmas, so have a very merry one. Blessings to you on the day of the celebration of Christ’s birth. “Immanuel Hath Come to thee, O Israel”!

It looks like my new blogging software might be able to be unveiled later tonight or, at worst, on December 26. At least that’s how I’m thinking at the moment. Right now, there are a number of key things missing, such as listing the proper number of comments on the front page, but that’s more of a cosmetic issue than a serious issue that should be a showstopper. It’s still better than no blog, right?

By the way, I want to give a really big “thank-you” to Christopher for offering WIT as a "home away from home" that I could post at temporarily. While I don't think I'll need it, given the progress I've made, it was nice just knowing I'd have a place to go, need be.

I wasn't sure how successful transfering the data from a flat file (plain text) database to MySQL would be, but it worked after spending a few hours hacking together a script to do so. The rest can come later, I figure. The big remaining job is to copy SAFARI 2 over onto the asisaid domain -- right now I have it on a test domain and I'd like to keep that domain a test domain so that I can continue to work on progress to a "gold" 2.0 version of SAFARI without breaking asisaid (right now, I'd consider SAFARI 2 somewhere between late alpha and early beta stage -- it works, but it still has some problems).

Anyway, just thought I'd give an update. I don't think I'll be done in time to do the Christmas post I wanted to do, but I'll just do it in a belated fashion. The other, really good news that I didn't have time to discuss yesterday is that the hospital released my dad yesterday. On Wednesday, he had sung "I'll Be Home for Christmas" to my mother -- I'm glad he wasn't disappointed. The doctor seemed quite optimistic about the way things are going.

comments (on OfB)

Well, I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned this here before, but for the last three years and two months, I have put my church’s newsletter online. For various reasons, I decided using Adobe Acrobat wasn’t such a good idea (mostly for aesthetic reasons) and so I convert the newsletter from WordPerfect format to individual HTMLized articles.

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