More plog sites

08/06/2005 20:08 | Categories: LifeType | 4 Comments 

Recently a new pLog-based site was launched. This one is a bit different one, it's in Farsi: Irxblog. It looks fantastic and it seems that it's been quite successful... They launched a few weeks ago and they've already got over 100 users. They're using pLog 1.0.1 with all its cool features like subdomains, custom URLs, caching, etc. It works great , and I am very happy to see that pLog can be useful to thousands of people from all countries and all languages.

They still have some issues with their own calendar (the Jalali calendar), which is not quite the same as the Gregorian calendar but I will take a look into it and see if we can integrate other calendars in pLog... Would be nice to have!

Best of luck for the Ixrblog guys!

pLog goes mobile!

06/06/2005 01:25 | Categories: LifeType | 0 Comments 

I have been working on and off for the last couple of weeks on a mobile version of plog. At first I thought about integrating it with the core (in the next major release, 1.1), but I eventually decided to implement it as a plugin: those who want this feature can have it now and those who don't need it, don't have to put up with the extra code

The plugin adds a new entry-point to plog, mobile.php which handles all the incoming requests from mobile devices. It implements its own action classes, views and more importantly, it implements the terminal detection.

Terminal detection in the mobile version of pLog is done based on the User-Agent string that all browsers send when making HTTP requests. The plugin is built so that every terminal 'group' can have its own custom templates, and each terminal is identified via a regular expression check against its User-Agent (take a look at the default terminal.properties.php file) This also means that all mobile versions of blogs share the same common look (only one mobile template per device)

I have only implemented support for Nokia Series60 phones (specially for the Series60 version Opera) because I do not have access to any other phone People are probably going to request WAP support but I will leave it up to them to do that... WAP is really a pain to work with and I have nowhere to test it. Other possible platforms include PDAs, Treo phones, iMode, etc, so I hope users help a bit here.

Last but not least, the mobile version of this blog is accessible via the "mobile version" link that you will find at the top. At the moment all requests will use the same template, a lighter HTML 4.01 page that allows to see posts and comments (both paginated) with no category listings, search engine or anything like that. It does not allow to leave comments yet but that is not a critical feature considering how annoying it is to type in mobile devices...

The plugin will be available shortly, as soon as I can document it in the wiki and upload it to Sourceforge.net

On open source and people's expectations...

02/06/2005 16:01 | Categories: LifeType | 4 Comments 

There's this guy in our forums who's apparently got a bit annoyed with our behaviour. Browsing through the plogworld.net referrers, I found a link to this:

http://www.bloghoster.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=689

He's apparently considering switching from pLog to BlogHoster (a similar solution but not free and not GPLed)...

A pearl from the link above:

I am currently using open source code as the base for my blogging site, however lately have been becoming very frustated with the lack of customization options without first editing or adding core class code changes.

And another one:

I have used them [pLog] for about a year now, and have steadily grown tired of the lack of insight the Devs have, as they only want to see things from a Dev point of view and refuse to see things from a 'Normal' user or 'Community' point of view."

Do we really lack insight? From whose viewpoint is that assertion made?

Note that this is the same guy who came up with a less-than-optimal new layout for his admin interface, totally and absolutely confusing, and then said that Jon never likes anything he does because he told him it was confusing. Perhaps if he actually knew what he was doing...

He's also the one who requested buddy lists a while ago. He did a good writeup about it (credit should be given where it is due) in the forums but that was it. Was he really expecting that we'd implement his wishes right away? How about our own roadmaps? How about we first fix issues that really need to be addressed?

For the record, this is the guy who promised me a while ago to create a nice tutorial for end-users, showing how to post, how to add files, etc. Needless to say, I am still waiting for those documents.

Open source is really starting to feel annoying because of this. People think they can demand everything from the development team and they cannot be bothered to make a small effort to achieve their goals. Heck, we've got a Paypal donation link in our home page for half a year now and we haven't even collected 100Ä yet.

I know this post probably sounds like I am an elitist bastard, but this kind of attitudes really annoy the hell out of me.

The funny thing is that when he posted the list of plugins he's currently using, one of the BH's forums moderator was really surpirsed at the amount of extra features one can get with pLog... No shit!, we haven't spent so many hours working on a extensible architecture for the sake of working on it!

And this brings me to another point: no matter how many things you give users for free (moblogging? gravatar integration? anti spam measures? guest books? content filters? comment moderation?), they will always remember you by what you do NOT offer...

Browsing through Technorati

28/05/2005 01:31 | Categories: LifeType | 4 Comments 

Looking through the links I got after searching for "plog" in Technorati, I came accross a few new sites. One which I particularly liked is the new blogging community of PHPTunisie. It does'nt look too big, but I like their work on the summary page and I hope that they enjoy using pLog

While browsing through those links, I also found some other users who didn't like pLog... Like one who said "I think that the Wordpress core is better than pLog" (say wha'? Any hard facts or are you talking out of your ass?) or another one who switched because Opera doesn't support HTMLArea very well (like it's our fault -- did he ever try our non-visual editor of posts?), or even another one who tried to upgrade, didn't succeed at the first attempt and switched to WP. Sometimes it's unbelievable how little effort people put into things...

Anyway, I am glad they left. We don't need this kind of users in our community.

Nokia 770

26/05/2005 07:54 | Categories: LifeType | 1 Comments 

The new Nokia 770 was introduced to the public today. The Nokia 770 is some sort of an "Internet tablet" that allows to browse the web, read emails, etc, from virtually anywhere as long as there is a WiFi connection or a Bluetooth connection to a GPRS phone available.

This wouldn't be news (yet another internet-capable-tablet-pda-gadget) if it wasn't because this one runs Debian Linux, with a GNOME-based environment on top of X11. The environment is called Maemo and the project page is already available, where users and developers will be able to find resources and new software for the platform. The browser that the thing is using is a GTK port of KHTML (yes, it really is KHTML running on GTK!) in the same way that Apple ported KHTML to Cocoa and created WebCore. All the methods from the Qt libraries which are used in KHTML were re-implemented using calls to GTK (Cocoa in OS X) while keeping the same interfaces, providing the "glue" between KHTML and Cocoa or Maemo. If interested in how Apple did it, check out the KWQ library from the WebCore code.

I think that this is a great move for Nokia, despite their schizophrenic behaviour when it comes to patents and OSS (first they lobby for patents in the EU and then they support Linux with patents from their own portfolio), but from a geek point of view, this product has the potential to attract many developers specially if you think that it is very easy to port already existing GNOME applications to run within Maemo (check out the screenshots of a ported version of Gaim)

Now I only need to get my hands on one

pLog informal status update

23/05/2005 01:10 | Categories: LifeType | 1 Comments 

Not much has happened in the pLog world recently, since I haven't had much time to work on it. I'm still confident we'll get rid of the 1.0.1 version sometime next week because I am already tired of it... only a few small issues here and there to fix.

But what I did have time to implement is the native support for RSS 2.0 enclosures. I had been meaning to do it for a while but it never seemed the right time so here it is I am sure that people who are into podcasting and vlogging will appreciate this feature. Only by upgrading to 1.0.1, will users get access automatically to this feature even though it won't work for old posts (it will only work with new posts whose links to resources were added via the "add resource" pop-up window) There is an example in our pLog development blog (look at the first "item" tag)

I've also started to use the new moblog plugin very heavily, as you might have noticed because of the amount of images in this page There seems to be however, something wrong with the thumbnail generation process. Images taken at a resolution of 640x480 pixels are too big for this layout, so I configured plog to generate medium-sized thumbnails of 500x375 pixels but it's actually ignoring those settings. I need to look into that but it won't probably be fixed before 1.0.2.

Speaking of 1.0.2 (and 1.1 too), things are going to heavily slow down in the plog camp in a few weeks time. We recently bought our new house and we're going to move in in the end of June. This means that we'll need all the time we can get to clean, paint and buy furniture that we can get so unless somebody steps forward and takes the leading role, we won't see a 1.1 release until probably late autumn or even early winter. 1.1 isn't going to represent a huge breakthrough as 1.0 did but it still has some nice improvements which will make hopefully make everybody happy (this includes Ben's work on implementing a disk-based cache system that speeds things up a *lot*)