Peter's Blog

Yeah, sure.

Blog*Spot/Blogger/whatever it is has a neat feature to specify your own domain name for your blog. Using this I have set up a new url for my moblog at http://moblog.petersblog.org in addition to http://petersmoblog.blogspot.com.

"Why bother" I hear you scream? Well, if I publish that url and it builds up any kind of readership (we live in hope) then I am free, should the whim take me, to change my hosting to some other platform without losing my audience.

I do care about you.

The big news could be the launch of Peter's Moblog. I got a new phone, a Sony Ericsson k800i as I wanted something with a better camera than my old K750i. This one is 3.2 megapixel and has a proper flash, albeit weedy. When I take pictures with the flash the background tends to be black. As a camera it is obviously not a patch on my Nikon D80 but the D80 doesn't fit in my pocket (I carry it in a backpack camera bag that I bought in Lidl). The k800i is a 'Cyberhot' i.e. branded as more camera focussed than a W series walkman phone.

The latest camera-phones are five megapixel but much more expensive and for me good lenses and low-noise electronics are more important than high resolution.

The flash pictures are a little noisy and the backgrounds are dark but they are ok, much better than the blurry efforts of the K750i. It has a feature that allows it to take nine shots at once, four before the shutter is pressed and four after so you can choose the best one. Problem is this doesn't work with the flash. It shares with the k750i an annoying long delay between pressing the trigger and getting a picture so a pose has to be held extra long. Thats something I love about the D80, photos are INSTANT.

The lens on the phone is very wide angle and one wonders why they bother with an autofocus mechanism. You have to get the phone quite close to the subject to fill the frame and it borders on fish-eye.

Anyway the phone has a built-in facilty to upload photo's as blog posts to blogger so I couldn't resist setting this up. I hate to think what my phone bill is going to be but I hope the moblog can be a non-techy slice of life, mainly watching my daughters grow. I really like the idea that I can update it anywhere there is a phone signal. The main problem with it is getting the portrait/landscape orientation right.

Sometime I may try to integrate the blogs by pulling the moblog posts into this blog.

UPDATE: if any blogspot veterans can let me know why some photos on the blog are disappearing then I'd be grateful.

UPDATE2: according to online billing, each picture post costs about 15p. Not too bad unless I do more than one a day when investing £6/month in a bundle may be better. It seems much faster for browsing so I may be using more data anyhow. Turns out phone is 3G and I could get Sky TV on it if only I didn't live in the back of beyond that is rural Kent. I think one of the G's get lost the other side of Maidstone.

UPDATE3: More notes:

• I like the ringtone I've chosen. The phone is a good music player, quite loud even if it isn't a walkman: perfect for annoying people on long train journeys. It can play CD tracks I've ripped in iTunes.
• Much less interference when talking close to a computer.

If you are really bored, you might like to check out my new Archive Page.

I thought about putting it in the sidebar but I didn't for a few reasons:

• it's ugly
• it takes time to generate the page and I didn't want the rendering of every url that wasn't already cached to require this hit.
• who cares anyway? It's mainly there to open up the older posts to search bots without them having to go through page/next 100 times.

On a more technical level, it uses the following route to give 'nice urls' for the year/month combinations:

map.connect 'post/on/:year/:month', :controller => 'post', :action => 'listbyyearmonth'
map.connect 'post/on/:year', :controller => 'post', :action => 'listbyyearmonth'

so March 2005 would be '/post/on/2005/3' which is cool.

I've missed blogging while I've been working on PetersBlogger. My old drupal blog was limping along: while administering the site it kept logging me out. I can admit now that I was running an old version of drupal (4.7?) which I couldn't upgrade due to module dependencies (mainly awtags). The old code wasn't running that smoothly under php5 despite initial appearancies.

I'm happy with my new blog platform, it's running really nicely on my slicehost slice and I've learnt an awful lot about rails while developing it. I will try to do a braindump of rails experiencies in forthcoming posts (cross fingers).

Drupal is a fine CMS and I'm using Drupal 5 on my company intranet. My thoughts on a drupal vs ruby on rails debate would be:

• drupal/php/apache is easier to deploy than a rails/ruby/mongrel/nginx deploy: I moved my drupal site between about four different hosts and did it each time in less than an hour. A rails setup is more convoluted (especially mongrel_cluster). However, this site is running much faster under rails than it was under drupal. The difference is probably down to php and apache being more mainstream and slightly more refined and hence easy to set up. I'm not saying rails is a total pain, just that if I only had ten minutes in which to deploy a site I would be reaching for drupal. If I only wanted to install the source and a few modules and never touch any coding then I would be happy with drupal.
• I love ruby and rails development. There is no comparison, php seems to me as much a bastard language as visual basic 6. Ruby was cleanly developed as an object orientated language, php is having object orientation grafted on as an afterthough.
• If I look through my drupal source I see no unit testing. Ruby/Rails has unit testing built in and I'm completely sold on it. I don't think I will ever trust any code (especially code I write) if it hasn't been unit tested. Some interesting aspects of unit testing:
  • I understand now the 'test driven' approach to development where you design a module's api by first roughing out how the tests will work: the unit test is your first experience of using the new api. It's during testing that you learn how nice an api will be.
  • If the documentation of a new ruby/rails tool is dubious, look in the unit tests to see how the author intended it to be used. If there are no tests then run.
  • If I run into a tricky bug, it's better to first reproduce it in unit tests, fix it there and then be happy that the bug will never recur. It's easier to debug code in a unit test (essentially a command line application) than on a live website.
• all ruby on rails applications follow basically the same architecture. It is fairly easy to figure out how a new application works. Every php application is different. I know I'm comparing a web framework to a programming language but none of the php applications (drupal, phpmyadmin) or am familiar with (wordpress) share a common architecture. New php application to maintain? New learning curve.
• my new site is being hammered with attempts to post to /comments/reply, even though it doesn't use that url for comment submission. The comment spammers know drupal and know where to test the locks. If any of them ever bother to try to find my comment submission url they will only find the same captcha that protected my drupal site (which was much easier to implement in rails, simply as a validation on the model).

This blog is now running on my new rails based blogging platform which I have called PetersBlogger (I'm not good at names).

It's mostly complete. Features:

• post articles (or you wouldn't be reading this)
• wilki formatting including syntax highlighting with ultraviolet e.g.

  strThis = "that"
  

• comments, including
  • moderation list
  • Peter's simplistic captcha system
• tagging
• pingomatic submission
• Technorati tags
• rss feeds (no atom yet)
• uses fragment caching for performance

Todo list:

• AJAX formatting preview
• atom feeds (do I care?)
• search (or rely on google)
• tag cloud
• archives by month/year: you DO care what I wrote in Feb 2005 right?
• gimmicks

Please let me know if you spot any sillies (that's if comment submission is working at all).

It's nice to use because the administration interface isn't split out into a seperate set of web pages, when I 'log in' I simply get extra buttons to press in the pages that you are seeing.

For the record I am still alive.

I'm busy working on a new blogging platform and I'm not quite ready to make it live yet. I decided to write it in Ruby on Rails directly rather than use an existing blogging application. I wanted something that ran under ruby on rails for the hackability and there were four candidates:

typo: Most popular rails blogging app but nobody seems to rate it as technically excellent. I tried the demo but was put off by the ajax: lots of complexity to go wrong there. mephisto: This seems to be highly regarded on a technical level but a few things put me off:

• it hasn't had an official release since 2006, the mephisto community seems to work in terms of svn revision numbers.
• it needs a pagination plugin to give basic functionality required by any blog with more than ten posts. I'd rather keep plugin requirements to a minimum (fewer things to break when upgrades come along).
• the database schema seems to be growing in complexity: 17 tables? The number of fields in the table that holds posts is also proliferating: 27 fields?
• the layout is configured by editing liquid templates. Apart from making it possible to edit layouts through the admin panel and to support themes, to me this just adds another layer of complexity and more to learn. I am happy with Rails built-in templating system. It took me no time to port my drupal theme to rails.

simplelog: a simple blogging platform but it didn't grab me. The link on the site to a wiki gives an access error.

radiant: Could be used for blogging but Radiant is primarily a cms. The author of Radiant uses Mephisto...

Development of my application has been quite rapid and it's very nearly ready for launch. However I have a problem with the Ruby on Rails testing framework: it's addictive and I can't bare the thought of putting up a live website without making sure it is thoroughly tested first. I'm in that testing/polishing phase that is hard to break out of if you have any kind of obsession with detail.

One thing is for sure: Rails is a joy to work with.

In the meantime, this old blog platform has lost it's lustre and I'm not so included to use it.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention hobix. I can't get past the website...

A google for "peter's blog" puts this site above the Blue Peter Blog!

Still top for 'Peter the wow noob'

I'm going to mention the phrase 'peter sublime hunter skillz' and see where it gets me.

UPDATE: it worked, no 1 google result next morning It also works for 'sublime hunter skillz' which is even better

Cross me and my wrath will be top of the google search results next day. So there.

I'm contemplating migrating this blog from drupal to Mephisto. The main reason is to put it on a more hackable platform. Drupal is theoretically hackable, being written in php, but the problem is that I find php a weak and ugly language, I'd rather play with Python or Ruby. I haven't been able to find a blogging platform written in Python, just a number of half finished projects (UPDATE: there is pybloxom but that uses files rather than a database which puts me off: SQL FTW). Ruby has at least two that I have found, both based on Ruby on Rails: typo and mephisto. Typo is a more popular application but from what I have read is leaning towards being a test bed for experimentation with Ajax. Mephisto seems cleaner and better designed so that is where I am aiming. Mephisto does seem a little cultish and doesn't have a large and active community. The principal developers seem very capable but are busy with something else.

Migrating the blog to Mephisto or any other platform has a number of problems which I am enumerating here as part of my planning:

• All the articles in the drupal database must be migrated. There is a framework here for migrating blogs to Mephisto and although it doesn't cover drupal (yet) this is a good start.
• The articles are all in wilki format and either need converting to textile (my preferred standard markup language) or a wilki filter needs to be written. Converting to textile is feasible and using a standard would make it easier to migrate again in future. However the conversion process would need to be perfect, developing a wilki filter has the advantage that I can fix presentation problems I find later, much easier than finding a problem and having to trawl the database to somehow identify and fix the broken textile.
• wilki uses the same syntax to link to other posts by node id and to link to tags by name. These links need migrating appropriately.
• Drupal offers many rss feeds based on categorys, tags, different paths, rss, atom etc. My access logs show a variety of these are being used but I don't know if any of these are actually being read by humans, scraped by bots or whether they are just ancient Rss aggregator subscriptions. I need a way to map all these old feeds onto appropriate feeds in the new system.

This isn't a simple matter. And I really need to be sure in myself that I find the right target before going through this hassle.

I'm finding the new Daily News blog format easier to deal with. It's less formal, it's easier to write and I think more readable. Collecting a days worth of notes on one page makes it more lightweight: I don't have to think of a title for each bullet point. I can edit the page as I change my mind or think of new things to mention.

How long will it last?