PolarLava::Blog

So back in November I announced EOL: PolarBlog and my plans to migrate my blog to Chyrp.  I don't have a lot of time available for playing around online these days, thus why it's been over 6-months and I still haven't moved.  I had made progress, contributed a few module fixes back to the project and only had a minor data transfer issue to resolve.  We're on the homestretch.

Well, that was until a few weeks back when I found that Chyrp is dead.  It's going away for similar reasons to Polarblog.  Not enough time and nobody else dedicated to enough to take up the project.  Thus I now find that I hitched my horse to the wrong wagon.  I'm less than thrilled by this, but I get it.  I chose the long shot for a reason and unfortunately instead of winning, it's headed to the glue factory!

So needless to say, I'm back to exploring my options.  I'm considering Wordpress after all, Drupal, Text Pattern and likely some others.  Thus I'm probably going to keep blogging on my platform for the foreseeable future as I need to make a new choice and then figure out the migration automation.  Live and learn I guess.

As part of my migration from PolarBlog to Chyrp, I need to carry over the various Topics that subdivide things.  The best choice in Chyrp to do that is the Categorize module.  Unfortunately it hadn't been updated to work with 2.0 and is no longer supported by the original developer.  I was planning on getting involved in the Chyrp community once I got setup and migrated.  I needed the Categorize module now so working through updating it I sort of had to get involved now.

You can now download the Categorize 2.1.0 module updated to work with Chyrp 2.0.  :)

There will likely be more contributions in the future to this project as well as a project page here once I get around to it.

It is with mixed feelings that I announce the end of life for PolarBlog and will be ceasing further development.

As anyone who has followed it's development will note, progress has been slow the past couple of years.  This is somewhat twofold, it's stable and does most of what I need (the primary driver) and also because I simply no longer have the time to do significant work on it.  Which is really the point I'm at.  The only real "want" feature that I haven't implemented is clean URL's.  That wouldn't be too difficult, but beyond that it would require major rework.

The time has come to address some of the fundamental architectural issues that exist.  If I were to do it all over, the first decision I would make would be to use a templating engine (Yapter obviously) from the start.  I've also learned a lot over the years and although I don't consider it horrible, there are some things I would definitely do differently.  It's a safe, secure and fast platform, but some of my past decisions have somewhat painted me into a corner when it comes to expansion.  The lack of templating makes theming rather difficult.  You can change the color scheme, but you can't easily change the layout.  And to fix that now would require a lot of work.  I'll never again build anything without fully separating the view.  MVC anyone?

It's been an interesting exercise and it continues to meet most of my blogging needs.  But it's time to the face facts that it's a very small fish is a big pond.  A pond dominated primarily by WordPress.  A platform I'm not a big fan of mostly because of their very bad security track record.  One of the advantages of being smaller is also being less of a target…although that hasn't stopped the spammers from automating comment spamming for PolarBlog.  Thanks, I'm flattered, but the world would be a better place if you would all just die.  Thankfully I implemented a number of counter measures (RBL, Akismet, IP blocking) that largely just made it a nuisance, thus you can stop wasting all of our time.

So where does that leave me and others who are currently running PolarBlog?  For me I've opted to move to Chyrp.  It has a larger community and is actively being developed and supports virtually all of the features that PolarBlog has as well as many it doesn't.  If you'd like to follow me in moving to Chyrp, it's probably best if you install and start playing around with it.  You're obviously under no obligation to do so, but I will be building a tool to migrate from PolarBlog to Chyrp.  If you choose to go another direction I'll try to answer any questions you have, but migration to anything else is up to you.  More information regarding the migration will come once I get it worked out.  In the meantime I'll continue to run PolarBlog and address any security issues that should, but are unlikely to arise.

PolarBlog V1.11 has been released.  This release contains a library update and a bug fix.

Enhancements

• Updated POP3 mail class.

• Post via email entry body content not being added to an entry without a ::MORE:: tag.

• None

• None

About a month ago NOAA's National Weather Service made some changes to their XML data feed.  In return, this broke my weather retrieval system.  The primary change they made was to no longer include empty elements in the feed.  Thus my error check routine in the weather class —which worked by counting elements in the feed, stopped working because there was no longer a set number of elements in the feed.  I fixed this —at least temporarily, by disabling this element counting in the error checking.  I'll need to do some further analysis to see what sort of error checking I might be able to do in the future, but for now this should suffice as the feed is extremely reliable.

Additionally there are a couple of minor bug fixes and some clean up.  I need to regenerate new API documentation yet, but other than the source view it should be functionally correct as it currently is.

So if this is something that might of interest to you or if you've been using it previously, jump to the PolarLava Weather project page where you can download it.