PolarLava::Blog

Everyday I come across new software, but rarely comment on them.  Why?  Because most of them aren't worth the effort to comment on.  The site and or project is lame, documentation is thin —something that I feel is important because it allows users to get up and running quicker, or it simply is just a retread of something I've already seen.  And I'm sure others feel that way about PolarBlog, after all, it's just another blogging package.  And it's certainly not the most full featured, but I digress…

Anyhow, today I came across phpFreeChat.  It's a lot like an IRC chat room, but instead runs in your browser and uses AJAX to update your window.  Very nice, very slick.  Don't think I have a need for it at this time, but a brief few minutes playing with it inspired me enough to write about it!  :)

Being my weekend consisted of a couple of inches of rain from Ernesto making 2/3rd's of it a wash out, I made the best of it…

I've not done any AJAX coding until this weekend when I realized I needed to do so in order to make my Weather page work as I desired.  With the new station selection logic I added to my new weather class, it was the best way to handle it.  Thus began a forray into installing PEAR on my shared hosting and then looking into how to do what I wanted to do.

Actually I knew what I wanted to do, that being use HTML_AJAX which was the quickest easiest way to accomplish the task at hand.  And at this point is seems to be working well.  I can definately see adding some other AJAX functionality to other areas of my site and my projects.  To do that though I will need to start looking at some of the other AJAX solutions I have found.    This way I can use them without depending upon PEAR being available.  And shockingly, I might even have time to do this now that I finally got PolarBlog V1.8.0 (Swainson's Hawk) Released!

PolarBlog V1.8.0 (Swainson's Hawk) has been released.  The major focus of this release is the addition of real-time IP blacklisting (RBL) to the commenting system and numerous bug fixes.

Enhancements

• Comment IP Blacklisting
• Added support for MySQLi extension (requires PHP5 & MySQL >= 4.1)
• Added automatic detection and (limited) support for PHP5 SPL.
• Calendar and right column CSS changes.  See css/left_nav.diff or css/standard.diff for more information.
• Added topic_icon_image CSS class to control topic icon display. Default now sets this to (float) display on the right.  title margin should be changed from 0px to -10px if you opt to change to this right side icon display.  See css/left_nav.diff or css/standard.diff for more information.
• A number of minor tweaks were done to the CSS files plus the addition of the RBL Admin CSS.  See css/standard.diff or css/left_nav.diff for more information.
• Changed RSS $config['rss']['feed']['encoding'] to use I18N_CHARSET by default so you don't have to change it in two places.
• Added $config['rss']['entry_count'] to set RSS feed entry count.  Falls back to DEFAULT_DISPLAY_CNT.
• Consolidated all JavaScript deletes to use confirmDelete() with localized message now passed.
• Added data validation for all input variables that weren't already being validated.
• Improved security checking by validating logged in users.
• Added additional entry table index to improve performance.

Well, another year has gone by since PolarBlog was first released publically.  (Actually it was last Wednesday, August 16 but forgot to post about it.)  So in last year's post I talked about some of the progress —oddly no mention of the commenting system, but the then upcoming "Homing Pigeon" post by email feature.  There's also a mention of "Bloodhound", the elusive trackback system that has yet to be started.  :)

The last release was in February to fix a serious problem in the Homing Pigeon release that went out last November.  It's obviously been a while since there has been a significant release, but I can assure you that in less than a month the release of Swainson's Hawk —primarily the RBL system, will be out!  Just doing some testing, some quick fixes and the drudgery known as documentation.  Hang in there PolarBlog users.  :)

And after that, it's on to Bloodhound which will also include some user self-management features.

Finally I can say I have some relatively positive and good news for those of you using PolarBlog…  The next release —Swainson's Hawk, is now running as a beta test on this blog.  This is a fairly sizable upgrade and contains the long awaited Realtime Blacklist (RBL) feature for comments.  Another major change is the option to use the MySQLi extension if you are running PHP5.  Additionally there are a number of bug fixes and other smaller changes.

I feel this is relatively solid code thus why I've upgraded my personal blog.  This way it gets some real world testing and I hopefully won't have to issue any minor updates in the days following the release.  Now the bad news…

It's going likely be a few weeks before this is ready to be release.  I have two things I have to do before it can go out, 1) Build an RBL administration tool to manage the RBL IP's and keywords; 2) Write the documentation to support the release so you might actually be able to set it up and use it.

So what can you do to help?  At this point, you can click around here looking for problems and post a comment here.  Even if you don't find any problems, if you visit and/or comment regularly you should post a comment just to see if your IP is currently blocked.