Martin Geisler Online

I’ve been moving stuff from my old website at gimpster.com here to mgeisler.net. All the pages and posts from the old WordPress installation has been moved, as have the stuff available under /images, /downloads, and /danish.

In a little while I’ll change gimpster.com so that it redirects people to mgeisler.net automatically. I’ll probably use a page asking people to update their links first, and then later start sending out 301 Moved Permanently headers.

If the Spam Karma system was giving you a hard time when you tried to submit your insightful comments, then please try again — I’ve just lovered the overall strictness setting to “normal”.

It is now also possible to post comments through a proxy server — people using their laptop (or tablet PC…) at their university will probably appreciate this :-)

So, Kristian also decided to move his blog to WordPress: http://zianet.dk/blog/ — the link in the sidebar is updated! He has his old posts there too, pretty cool.

Having gone from a simple home-made system based on HTML fragments, to a system with Wiki markup, and now to a dedicated blogging system using Markdown markup I now have posts in three formats. No two, since I’ve converted the HTML fragments.

I think we need a simple format to store posts in to avoid such stupid situations. This format could very well be an XML dialect, but that’s not the important part, the important part is to have a single format for blog posts. Posts could then be translated into whatever format your favorite blog requires, be it XHTML, Markdown or a Wiki markup format.

If this common format is an XML dialect it would be easy to parse, but tedious to edit — XML is not meant to be edited by humans. (Not that it’s impossible, using the nxml-mode for Emacs it’s not that bad.) So to make it efficient to we need to be able to map back and forth between the canonical XML format and a Wiki-like (or Markdown, call it what you want) variant.

Given such a format and solid conversion tools I hope that we can avoid parse errors like those I’ve written about before. And we would have a more versatile tool than what we have with XHTML, Markdown, Wiki, and all the other markup languages separated.

Using the Wiki-like markup system PHP Markdown is not without issues. Or rather, testing a little on the PHP Markdown Web Dingus (I wonder what a “dingus” is?) shows that it must be the way WordPress handles the data that causes the problem.

Take a look at this comment. The double-quotes are escaped with a backslash, why?! My guess is that WordPress is broken with regard to special characters. It reminds me of the problems I had when I was just starting out learning PHP. But please don’t tell me that WordPress has such embarissing mistakes! A system installed on more than 12,126 systems (as of February 17th 2005) should be better tested than this.

Just three days after installing WordPress my blog has been spammed — I guess that shows how quickly the blog is integrated into bigger blogging community thank to the links from Janus and Kristian and the automatic pinging of several other sites by Ping-O-Matic.

So the world is tuned in… that’s all very well if it weren’t for those pesky spammers! I’ve had seven spam comments already, and it didn’t look like it was going to stop. But with help from Spam Karma I hope to get rid of them. It checks the comment in several ways and deletes it if it determines that it is definite spam. Good comments are let through immediatedly. Comments where Spam Karma is in doubt will be subjected to a captcha test where you have to recognize some letters in an image. That is a really cool feature which should ensure that no automated program can post comments, while still allowing access to real people.

Provided that the commenter gave a valid email address when submitting the comment, he or she can also verify themselves using that. That also means that people with bad sight can get their comments approved even if they cannot use the captcha test.