captsolo weblog

Recently I did some changes to improve your experience when visiting this site.

First of them was getting rid of comment spam. Now the site is reasonably spam-free and it is safe to subscribe to comments feeds and have a more dynamic way to follow conversations:

- comments in RSS - comments in Atom

You may have been wondering why the number of post comments in a recent posts list was often much higher than the number of comments a post has. No, I was not inflating it to make those posts more interesting. That number also included a number of comments rejected by the spam filter. Fixed - now shows only a number of published comments.

That's all for the comments.

Power-user's tip: subscribe to a category-specific posts feed.

First you need to find out the category id (see below). Go to any invidual post page on the blog and find a list of categories in the right-hand sidebar (it's hidden on the front page, for simplicity). Look at the category link URL and find the category number at the end of it: "?cat=number".

Once found, add it to the URL of the main posts feed. E.g. Semantic Web is category #3 and its feed URL is: http://captsolo.net/info/xmlsrv/rdf.php?blog=1&cat=3

There are some more interesting things you can do with per-category feeds:

- Combine multiple categories together = "Social Software" + "Semantic Web" would be: http://captsolo.net/info/xmlsrv/rdf.php?blog=1&cat=3,82

- Aggregate sub-categories (automatically done by b2evolution). A category feed will contain posts that appear in the main category or in any of its sub-categories. E.g., a feed for "My Folder" also contains "Art", "Presentations", ...: http://captsolo.net/info/xmlsrv/rdf.php?blog=1&cat=41

This is quite powerful (and been in b2evolution for years). Main downside is that you can't easily guess that these feeds are available or find out what category identifiers to use. That's where we would benefit from a structured category hierarchy made available in RDF using SKOS (and integrated into the SIOC profile of the blog).

b2evolution Debian package has found it's way to Debian Mentors repository.
You may now start using it.

Thanks to Arnaud Guiton who created it.

b2evolution is a multi-lingual, multi-user, multi-blog publishing system written in PHP and backed by a MySQL database. It is distributed under GPL license.

Most importantly to me, it is the blog engine that I am using.

Wikipedia: b2evolution

If you have ever wondered how to get Flickr post photos to b2evolution based blog you know that you won't find b2evo in flickr list of blog engines.

Then this HowTo should help you:

[ Flickr - how to set it up with b2evolution ]

Wrote code to display a box with last commented posts in b2evolution.

Simple, yet useful thing - displays a list of posts that have been commented last. Each post is displayed only once, a number after a post indicates how many comments it currently has.

Read more! »

The upgrade to b2evo v0.9 completed.

If you notice any errors, please report.
If you notice changes you like, tell me.
(though not much changed on the outside)

New version is interesting, upgrade & installation easy.
Many visual and functional changes to the admin interface (from 0.8.6).
Localisations of the blog, installation and admin interface.
There is a Lithuanian localisation, I wonder who might do the Latvian translation?

In short time I will reapply my local changes:

* showing remote IP address for referers & searches (admin interface) - +OK+
* 'last comments' box on the blog page
* 'currently reading' box on captsolo and small-n-tabby weblog - +OK+
* link to my FOAF profile - +OK+
* adding GeoURL information - +OK+
* fix to make searches case-insensitive [could be the fault of my host server mysql why the searches get case-sensitive, but since Francois says its not b2evo bug, i'll have to patch it locally] - +OK+
* some skin improvements - show author's name, post status, show post status by change of post frame appearance, ...

I did not think there were so many small changes I've done...

Some nice changes:

* plugins (textile, texturize, BB-code, ...) - can be enables/disabled on a per-post basis
* comments - open/closed/ disabled for each post
* RSS feeds for comments