Just a Theory

I’ve just added a new feed: teasers only. It makes things a log shorter for those who just want to get a teaser for each blog entry, rather than complete entries, such as Planet Perl and Planet PostgreSQL.

Any questions or problems? Leave a comment. Thanks!

I’ve had an open policy on comments on this blog since it started. A couple years ago, I added a timeout on trackback pings, so that you can’t trackback ping a posting more than two weeks after I wrote it. But I left manual comments in, along with the simple math bit, since comments and spam have been low volume.

Curiously, though, although this is not a popular blog, and I’ve posted to it all of twice in the last six months, I’ve been getting a lot more comment spam in the last few weeks. I’ve been having to manually delete upwards of 100 spam comments a day. Well, I’m bored with that. So I hereby announce a new comment policy: You can comment on a blog post for up to two weeks after I post it. After that, the comment period will be over. I’m sorry to have to do this, and maybe it will change if I ever switch to Word Press or something, but for now, I think it will do.

The vast majority of non-spam comments I get on any particular post after two weeks or so is a request for support. So I don’t think that the new policy will hamper anyone much, and for those looking for support, well, this is not the appropriate forum. But if you do feel compelled to comment on something after the comment period, just email your comment to me and I’ll add it in as I deem appropriate.

Thanks for understanding. I really appreciate getting this time back every day. And, of course, if you’d like to respond to this new policy in any way, well, you have two weeks to leave a comment on this post. ;-)

I’ve completed the migration of all of the content from my old site, david.wheeler.net. All requests to that domain will get a permanent redirect to this site. Where possible, I tried to make the old URLs redirect to the new URLs. So if you try to connect to david.wheeler.net/osx.html, you should be automatically redirected to www.justatheory.com/computers/os/macosx/my_adventures.html. The same goes for the following documents:

• Patch for Apache + DBM on Mac OS X
• Migrating to Mac OS X
• Patch for mod_ssl on Mac OS X

If you happen to notice that I missed anything, comment on this blog entry to let me know.

I finally got my mod_rewrite rules working for Blosxom, so now it finally looks like I have a real site! The problem was that %{REQUEST_FILE} wasn’t actually the full file name on the file system, but the request URI! I have no idea why, but once I figured out thisproblem I was able get ‘round it by using %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}%{REQUEST_URI}. So now my configuration looks like this:

<VirtualHost *>
  DocumentRoot /usr/local/www/doc_roots/justatheory
  ServerAdmin david@justatheory.com
  ServerName justatheory.com
  ServerAlias www.justatheory.com
  CustomLog /usr/local/www/logs/access_log.justatheory combined
  <Directory /usr/local/www/doc_roots/justatheory>
    AddHandler cgi-script .cgi
    Options +ExecCGI
  </Directory>
  RewriteEngine on
  RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}%{REQUEST_URI} !-f
  RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}%{REQUEST_URI} !-d
  RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ /blosxom.cgi/$1 [L,QSA]
</VirtualHost>

And all is well. Now, if only I could get the meta plugin working properly...