PolarLava::Blog

PolarBlog V1.6.0 (Hitchhiker) has been released.  This release fixes a number of bugs as well as implements a variety of smaller changes.

Enhancements

• Backed out V1.5.0 change that displayed the topic before the entry name on the Index Page.
• The CSS for the Recent Entries, Topics and Other Blogs lists has been updated in the CSS files distributed with PolarBlog.  Details about this change can be found in this PolarBlog CSS blog entry.
• Upgrade to MySqlDb class to V1.6.0.
• Upgraded PHPMailer to V1.73.  This addresses a potential DOS attack exploit.
• Disabled DB class debug messages which generally don't want enabled.
• Addition of UTF-8 German language translation.
• Addition of French language translation in ISO-8859-1 and UTF-8 character sets.
• Added DISPLAY_DISABLED text to disabled comments.  This is the same as what is done on disabled entries.
• The RSS feed generator has been substantially reworked.  Full support for HTTP Conditional GET's has been implemented.  It now checks your last updated entry in the database to determine if the feed should be regenerated.  It there are no new entries a 304 not changed header is returned.  If there are new entries, the RSS expire time is checked.  If the expire time has passed then a feed is generated, otherwise a 304 is returned.
• Added "//setlocale(); //see documentation for usage" to the the config.php.dist file's localization section.  There have been some users that have needed this to make their localization work properly.  Unless you are installing for the first time and your installation is working fine, you can need not worry about this setting.
• As always there were several updates to the docmentation.  Most notably, the .htaccess File section of has been updated.  You are advised to review this updated section.

• Changed the RSS feed alternate link tag from the text rss20.xml to rss,php the dynamic feed generator.  If you are not using the default index.php page, but are rather using your own custom or integrated page, you may want to check/update this setting in the link tag of your installation.
• Removed errorneous colon from German NO_SEARCH_RESULT translation.  This was resulting in a double colon because there is already one in the coded output.
• Using TOPIC_ICON_WIDTH was not working properly and failing validation because of a missing space.
• Failing XHTML validator on comments anchor.  This has been fixed by wrapping this is in a
  tag.
• Fixed typo error that was causing space entities ( ) to appear in comment notification emails.
• Edit Comment displays "Display Entry" checkbox was always checked even when the comment was disabled.  The display flag on the comment is now respected properly.
• Suppression of Ping-O-Matic! errors when the service is temporarily unavailable.

• None

Today marks the first anniversary of PolarBlog as it was one year ago today that I first publically released it.  Thing started off fast and there was a lot of activity during the first several months before it was put on hold so I could work on several other projects.  But in the past couple of weeks I've finally begun to work on it again and anticipate that there will be a (minor) release in the next few weeks.  After that will be the more significant "Homing Pigeon" release that will add support for posting via email.  The release after — "Bloodhound", will focus on the addition of trackbacks for entries.  And that's about as much as I've mapped out at this point.  So here's to its first year and continued development!

My additional enhancements for PolarLava CycleLog V2.2.0 (I'iwi) are complete.  The following are the changes that were completed:

• Minor Name Change - Henceforth instead of just calling it "CycleLog", it will be known as "PolarLava CycleLog".  This is in anticipation that I may publically release this project in the future.  Although it's not currently packaged and documented for public consumption, if you're a PHP hacker, a cyclist and are interested, just ask.
• Search Improvements - A lot of changes were made to the search page.
  1. Searches no longer are required to be date bounded.
  2. Added minimum and maximum distance bounding.
  3. Added minimum and maximum average speed bounding.
  4. Added the ability to do ad hoc searches of the notes field.
  5. Added some basic search help on the page.
• Sleep Time/Quality - Added "hours of sleep" and "sleep quality" fields to the ride Personal Data section.
• Yearly Summary Page - Similar to the home pages "Year-To-Date" display, a page that displays this same information, on a year by year basis has been added.
• Security Upgrades - A full security analysis of all SQL queries was performed and all queries now use SafeSQL.
• Miscellaneous Bug Fixes - As always there were handful of small bugs to fix!.
• Calendar View - A monthly calendar view that shows basic ride info for the days that I've ridden in a month.  This includes a weekly summary on each Saturday and monthly summary below the calendar.  This component allows you to navigate to any month year which you might want to view..

• Search Improvements - The ability to search based on a bounded temperature range similar to the distance bounding.  This is a little more involved because of the temperature data is not readily available in the same place as the ride data.
• Bike Page - A page to display information about each bike along with a picture.
• Records Page - A new page to list some extremes: longest ride distance, longest/shortest ride by time, fastest average speed ride, maximum speed, extremes of weather, etc.
• Summary Update - Make some of the elements clickable to the rides they relate too.
• Bike Maintenance - A sub-component of the Bike Page to allow for maintenance records for each bike.

As part of my ongoing upgrade, one of the features I wanted to add to my CycleLog was a monthly calendar.  I've written some calendar stuff previously, but I didn't want to do another "one off" or reinvent the wheel if I could find something that potentially would be reusable.  And I must say, I was certainly not disappointed when I found Active Calendar.  This is an absolutely wonderful and well written piece of calendaring software licensed under the LGPL.  So this is my plug for Giorgos Tsiledakis and his well thought out and implemented work.  Thus if you're a PHP developer looking to do something with calendars, I'd highly recommend you check out Active Calendar before you waste your time writing something inferior and less flexible to this work.

Okay, I've decided to start looking into Alan's request for the ability to post to PolarBlog via email.  This will probably take a bit of time as I still intend to continue with PolarLava CycleLog V2.2.0 (I'iwi) at the same time.  But I've often been intrigued by doing email posting even before Alan started desiring it.  Thus I've spent some time this morning exploring some options on accessing a POP3 account via PHP this morning.  Not sure whether I will be going that route or doing this with Perl.  Still need to think through the logistics  of it all.  I figured adding this feature will sort of ease me back into PolarBlog development.  Being a new/separate component it shouldn't muck up current code base which is always a good thing.  :)