SCodePlugin v0.5 has been released, expect the jar and source downloads to be available from SourceForge mirrors in the next few days. As usual, if you want it earlier, just email me and I’ll send it to you.

Changelog:

• Introduced KaptchaImageEngine using Kaptcha (was Simple Captcha) library, with 3 new flavours from KinkImageEngine, FishEyeImageEngine, and ShadowImageEngine.

• Replaced image engine class loading in image factory with constructor injection. SCodePlugin passes the image factory to SCodeServlet, instead of passing the image engines.

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Still using Kaptcha, I added 2 new flavors to SCode Plugin: “fisheye” and “shadow”. Here’s the screenshot:

Same as “kink”, these new flavors will be part of SCode Plugin 0.5 .

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Jon Stevens resurrected Simple Captcha in the form of Kaptcha. The good thing about Simple Captcha / Kaptcha is that it generates an image similar to the ones used at Yahoo!. Other than that, it’s really straightforward to use.

I quickly integrated Kaptcha into SCode Plugin by introducing KinkImageEngine, exposed to Blojsom via “kink” flavor. Here’s how it looks like:

This flavor will be included in SCode Plugin 0.5 (yet to be released).

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Blojsom 3 was first mentioned on March 23rd 2006, and it was finally released (post milestone releases) on September 29th 2006.

The first time I mentioned about updating my plugins was on March 27th 2006. And today, March 25th 2007, almost a year later, I finally finished updating all plugins with necessary improvements along with documentation updates. Phew.

Here are some notes of each plugin:

BlogTimes Plugin

In Blojsom 2, BlogTimes Plugin only draws the current entries on the page, which means it only draws one blog time on a permalink view. This doesn’t give a good indication on the user’s blogging time pattern. In Blojsom 3, it draws a configurable number of N latest entries. So if you set it to a large value, e.g. 100, then you’ll get better graph on the time you post your last 100 blogs regardless whether you’re on a permalink view or not.

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I just checked my server log between Dec 19, 2006 and today. SCode Plugin has successfully prevented 2140 comment spams, but there were 122 spams which slipped through the cracks. Those 122 provided correct answers from the CAPTCHA image. And judging from the timestamps, I’m pretty sure that those 122 were automated spam attacks using bots. However, considering that evil spammers would go as far as hiring freelancers to solve CAPTCHAs manually, there’s a chance that some people out there somewhere ‘unintentionally’ spammed my blog manually 122 times since Dec 2006. Ouch!

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After upgrading this blog to Blojsom 3.1, I hooked up Pager Plugin’s pager.vm velocity code to SkipFilterHelper Plugin, and the result is as you can see at the bottom of my blog when you’re not viewing this post via feed or permalink (e.g. try the blog home page).

There is a bug with SkipFilterHelper Plugin in Blojsom 3.1 (registered in JIRA as BLOJSOM-195, David checked in the fix to CVS), which is about incorrect total pages on boundary cases. I immediately noticed this error because it also exists in Pager Plugin 0.2 . The SkipFilterHelper Plugin fix will be included in Blojsom 3.2, and in the mean time you can either apply the fix yourself to Blojsom 3.1 and rebuild from source, or email me and I’ll send you the patched jar.

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Update: all plugins are now available for download from Source Forge.

I’ve finished updating most of my plugins to work with Blojsom 3, they’re currently in testing on both this blog and Melbourne Photoblog.

If you want to try the SNAPSHOT versions on your Blojsom 3 installation, you can download them temporarily from my server (I’ll add the released versions to SourceForge later on): blogtimesplugin-0.2-SNAPSHOT.jar, galleryrplugin-0.2-SNAPSHOT.jar, gravatarplugin-0.2-SNAPSHOT.jar, param2ctxplugin-0.2-SNAPSHOT.jar, scodeplugin-0.4-SNAPSHOT.jar, trackbackkeywordplugin-0.2-SNAPSHOT.jar.

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Before Blojsom 3, I could get away with moving my blog content from my web host to my home environment (and vice versa) simply by moving the text files. Now that I’m using MySQL for Blojsom 3, I figured that the easiest way is to use MySQL dump.

Export to the dump file: mysqldump -p -u [username] [dbname] > [dumpfile].sql Import from the dump file: mysql -p -u [username] [dbname] < [dumpfile].sql This might not be a good solution if you have a large amount of records, but that will do for me for now. It’s also easy enough to delete the irrelevant bits from the dump file and only move the content you want.

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It was a nice surprise to find out that Wish web site appears on the first page (ranked 8th) of Google.com.au search result for the word ‘wish’. Yes, that’s right. ‘wish’, that’s it, just the 4-letter word.

And it’s currently ranked 5th on google.com. Whoa! That’s a superb result considering that the site does not have the word ‘wish’ itself as part of the domain name (mbledug.com) or even a sub domain, and ‘wish’ only appears as a context path in the full URL http://mbledug.com/wish . Plus it doesn’t hurt to have other sites linking to Wish, like Lifehacker.

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Update: please welcome Red Cog. It’s about time :).

Note: the following is just a speculation. My predictions for World Cup 2006 were all wrong, so…

David posted a picture of a business card with a large Blojsom logo. This is a follow up to his earlier post on name title with his usual ‘cryptic’ style. Tracing way back, it got to be related to Blojsom as a registered trademark, following yet another cryptic hint.

I’m guessing that he’s setting up Blojsom, the company. And I predict that it is going to provide paid customer support for Blojsom. Which is good for the project/product!

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