PolarLava::Blog

Earlier today I came across this Blog Software Smackdown: The Big 3 Reviewed.  What?  No PolarBlog?  Hello?  Anyone who could possibly be reading this knows that PolarBlog is by far the best blogging software on the planet!  And if you don't already know this, you can trust me.  I know, because I wrote it!  ;)

Seriously though, the last thing I really need is for PolarBlog to become hugely successful.  I don't have enough time to get done what I want to do now, I don't need lots of people crying for features.  Plus it would likely get eaten by the comment spammers at this point.  But fear not, realtime black listing is coming in the future.

This is my first post via the new PolarBlog POP3 email interface.  If this is working as it should, this is the body portion of the post.  This is largely just a test message, but also represents a significant achievement on the progress of the Homing Pigeon release.  This posting should posted by "Kevin", be titled "Posting via Email" and be located under the "Software Development" topic.  There should now be a read more link.   …more

When I originally created PolarBlog, one of the features from Personal Weblog (PWL) that was dropped was PostgreSQL support.  This was largely because I'd never worked with it and didn't have access to a PostgreSQL database.  (Actually I still don't.)

Recently I was contacted by an individual who had some very nice things to say about PolarBlog and expressed an interest helping to port it to PostgreSQL.  Very cool I thought.  We've only had a couple of preliminary discussions about it, but this has definately become something I would like to do.  Thus to support this fully I will need access to a server with a PostgreSQL database.  Arrangements for that are already in the works and more details about how that is going to happen will be forthcoming. (November 21, 2005 - See this entry for more info.)

So why am I doing this?  It's going to be a lot of work obviously, so why bother.  In short, the challenge.  I've never worked with PostgreSQL although I've heard very good things about it.  This is also a very good opportunity for me to learn something of potential value for not just this project, but for my professional life.

I likely will not be concentrating on this until sometime early next year.  There are a number of things I need to deal with before I can realistically take this on.  First off I will be getting the PolarBlog "Homing Pigeon" out the door.  This release is roughly 90-95% complete.  The core functionality is nearly done, but then I have some CSS issues I need to clean up and then another security audit to possibly address some potential issues.  And then there is the alway fun updating of the documentation.  It's a drag, but it's what makes my projects friendly and easy to use in my opinion.  My goal right now is to provide current users with a Christmas present by getting this out by the end of the year.

PolarBlog V1.6.2 (Fungus Gnat) has been released.  This release fixes a serious comment deletion bug and another minor comment posting bug.

Enhancements

• None

• Deleting a comment deletes all top level comments! This  was being cause by a bug in MySqlDb::stripArray() where nested arrays were not being handled properly.
• The auto-linebreak option on comments does not work.  This has been corrected.

• None

I've just found that a bug fix I made in V1.5.2 (Groundhog)…

"Deleting a single comment destroying all root level comments!  A serious array data mishandling issue in the DB class has been corrected.  Nested arrays are now handled properly."

Has NOT been fixed and appears to still exist!  I know this because I've once again trashed my comments table! :(  So until I can extract it from the backup (probably tomorrow), my comments on most entries will be missing.

Consider this your warning not to delete comments until I get this fixed.  An easy work-around is to edit the offending comment and disable the display option.  Generally this is what I do even with spam comments, but was fixing another comment problem and stumbled upon this while deleting a duplicate comment I created.

I don't have an ETA for fixing this, but I will likely issue a new release to address just this problem once I do fix it.  Sorry.  I hope this hasn't/doesn't hit you too!