escrib

Bye bye Blogspot...

2005-01-18T13:22:00.000+13:00

From now on I'll be posting at porges.name. That is all.

Bayesian scavenging.

2004-12-30T22:42:00.000+13:00

Spent the afternoon coding the algorithms from SpamBayes into PHP. Hurrah for open-source!

Spam prevention process

2004-12-29T18:22:00.000+13:00

A quick outline of the process I'll be using to prevent comment spam. Hidden field hashing as described in "Comment spam prevention". This also forces a preview, which may fool spambots, and allows you to check the comments (for such things as invalid HTML, too many links) without having to perform all the following for the preview. Check the IP address against Spamhaus, DSBL, and any other

Apache's mod_rewrite and URI encoding...

2004-12-23T14:42:00.000+13:00

For the rule "RewriteRule ^blog(.*)$ escrib/Escrib.php?arg=$1": http://localhost/escrib/Escrib.php?arg=%252525 → arg is %2525 (correct) http://localhost/blog/%252525 → arg is %25 (incorrect) Argh. And according to the mailing list, there is no way around this. So, what happens when a user wants to use a percentage sign in their titles? Title: "44% of US Citizens favour more

Romanization test 2.

2004-12-20T13:07:00.000+13:00

"イメージプレス" (from Standing Tall) transcribes to "imējipuresu", which I believe means "Imagepress". Similarly, "カテゴリー" transcribes to "kategorī" ("categories"), "リンク" to "rinku" ("links"), and "アーカイブ" to "ākaibu" ("archives"). Of course, the macrons would need to be stripped as well. I'm still looking for a reference for kanji characters. Pointers would be appreciated!

Comment spam prevention.

2004-12-19T11:55:00.000+13:00

Here's a (relatively) simple, cookie-less technique I've thought up to help prevent comment-spamming. I'll use it in co-operation with other, already-existing techniques. The comment form has a hidden field "hashnodata" which the server sets to SHA1(ENTRY_ID + USERS_IP + XSTRING + IP_NUMBER_OF_COMMENTS_ON_ENTRY). EntryID is the ID of the entry in question. User IP is the page viewer's IP address

Transcription example.

2004-12-19T01:29:00.000+13:00

As an example of the language-dependent transcription (or transliteration) I talked about a few posts ago... a PHP function to change Unicode Russian text into ASCII. (Following the directions on the Wikipedia page.) static function Russ2Asc ($str) { $str = str_replace(' ','-'); $str = preg_replace('/(?

URL structure

2004-12-18T15:30:00.000+13:00

Post permalink: http://example.com/post/slug-goes-here Last post: http://example.com/last Latest posts (default front page): http://example.com/latest Latest X posts: http://example.com/latest/X First post: http://example.com/first Categories: http://example.com/category/cat/sub-cat/sub-sub-cat Notify script (both pingback + trackback): http://example.com/notify/slug-goes-here Comment

Slugs

2004-12-17T14:47:00.000+13:00

This post was prompted by the horrific permalink for my previous post... "http://escrib.blogspot.com/2004/12/itrntinliztin.html"!As Charl has said, mixing memorable slugs with hard-to-remember dates doesn't make any sense. Why have something that is easy to remember only to bugger it up with something like 2004/08? Slug-only permalinks are the way I'm going. Slugs shall be generated by the

Iñtërnâtiônàlizætiøn

2004-12-10T18:56:00.000+13:00

Well, I have successfully coaxed PHP into all kinds of character-set trickery. TrackBacks and PingBacks (along with any other HTML page) can be converted into UTF-8 NFC. Request URLs are normalized to UTF-8 NFC. (To avoid this problem.) User input is converted to and stored as UTF-8 NFC. Output is converted to the browser's declared preference, both in content-type and character-set. As

World Domination Step One: Complete.

2004-12-10T18:53:00.000+13:00

Top ranking on Google for the query "escrib". Thank you, obscure blog name!

Validating ISO 8601 input.

2004-12-10T01:43:00.000+13:00

Ensures that everything is entered within valid ranges... just a shame I couldn't get this to check leap years as well ;) /(?<=\A)(?(?=\d{2})(\d{0,2}\d{2})(?(?=-0?9|-0?4|-0?6|-11)-(\d{1,2})(?(?=-)-([0-2]?\d|30)(?(?=T)T([01]?\d|2[0-3])(?(?=:):([0-5]?\d)(?(?=:):([0-5]?\d)))))|-(0?\d|1[0-2])(?(?=-)-([0-2]?\d|3[01])(?(?=T)T([01]?\d|2[0-3])(?(?=:):([0-5]?\d)(?(?=:):([0-5]?\d)))))))Z(?=\Z)/

Respecting q-values during content negotiation.

2004-12-09T22:32:00.000+13:00

Just wrote this in the course of playing around and thought some others might find it useful. Returns the UA's preferred option for any of the HTTP headers which potentially have q-values. Supply it with the HTTP header you want evaluated, a list of what things your program can serve in the order it would like to serve them (in lowercase — in_array is case-sensitive), and whether or not failing

TrackBack oddity

2004-12-09T11:59:00.000+13:00

Why does the TrackBack specification say to check the dc:identifier attribute of the Description element when the rdf:about attribute already specifies the resource that the description is about? This duplication of information is a little puzzling. Perhaps it has something to do with this, which describes a change from an earlier version of the document, and seems to suggest that originally

Welcome to the Christian Republic of America.

2004-11-04T13:02:00.000+13:00

Well, I don't have much else to say. It's official. Russell Brown sums it up pretty well, as always. I'm sure that everyone's probably sick of reading about it by now, so this is the end of my posts about the election, save to say it's started already. Still, there are some small victories to be had. Or there's always Tecumseh.

Return to power.

2004-11-04T01:08:00.000+13:00

Well it would seem that, despite his track record and the unanswered questions, most of America agrees upon the 15 things you need to believe to vote for Bush. Sadly. Nader's comment was spot on: He's an ignorant president. He's a corporation disguised as a human being. Or at least that's as close as I can remember it... In other news, I'm bored so I'm writing a personal blog tool