PolarBlog: The Second Year

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.

I'm a Guinness!

You Are Guinness
You know beer well, and you'll only drink the best beers in the world.
Watered down beers disgust you, as do the people who drink them.
When you drink, you tend to become a bit of a know it all - especially about subjects you don't know well.
But your friends tolerate your drunken ways, because you introduce them to the best beers around.
What's Your Beer Personality?

PolarBlog: Swainson's Hawk Beta

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.