Guus Bosman

Occasionally you may see a spam comment on the website: somebody making commercials for other websites or commercial products, usually of dubious value.

If they show up, I delete such comments within a couple of hours. In fact, the great majority of spam comments are automatically blocked by filters (up to 50 comments a day). This morning somebody told me that a real, legitimate comment was filtered out... which is not what I want!

I've changed the filter settings. Comments placed by logged in users will not be checked for spam anymore, only comments from anonymous users will. If you do experience any problems please let me know -- your comments are a very big part of the fun of this website.

The website has been down for over 3 days -- the longest outage in years!

A power outage in Middenmeer, combined with my parents being out of town were the root cause of the outage.

Thanks to Jaap the various problems have been resolved (thank you). The resignation of the Minister for Energy in the Netherlands has been demanded.

Drupal uses GD, a library to manipulate images. The operating system of my webserver is OpenBSD, and I recently upgraded to OpenBSD 4.0. The upgrade went fine, except for GD: I couldn't upgrade it. I would always get the following error message: lib not found freetype.13.1.

It turns out that OpenBSD now comes with a new version of GD, which requires the freetype library. The only supported way to install that on OpenBSD is by installing xbase.tgz, the X-Windows libraries. I don't use X-Windows and it's not exactly a clean solution to install 10 MB of code to get a single library to work, but it helped. After a reboot of the server GD now works under OpenBSD 4.0.

One of the things about the new site that I received feedback on were the comment subjects.

In the new system it wasn't always clear what article a comments was for, especially in the Recent Comments block on the right hand side. I didn't like that either.

The beauty of Drupal is that you can download and install optional modules that change the default behavior of the site. Today I installed the comment_subject module that makes the comment subjects a lot more logical. Users still have the option to change the subject of a comment but the defaults make more sense now.

Tonight I upgraded the server to OpenBSD 4.0. This is the first time I upgraded the operating system remotely.

It was a bit scary because I couldn't walk to the console if something would go wrong, but the upgrade went fine. The package management system of OpenBSD made the upgrade of applications like MySQL, PHP and Apache a breeze. I upgraded to OpenBSD 3.9 in October of last year when I was in the Netherlands.

The server has been very unstable this week. I'm pretty sure this is fall-out of the full hard disk and things should be better now after I did a fsck. Sorry for the inconvenience, dear reader.

Elke mentioned that sometimes a message "Unable to connect to database server" appears for a while. This should be taken care of now -- the database server will start up automatically after a machine reboot.

Tonight I noticed that the website was very slow so I checked if there was enough free space available. And the /var partition was 100% full again, while I had just cleaned it up yesterday.

So I did a quick sanity check and quickly found that I had left MySQL logging on "verbose", with this result:

A 2.5 GB log file on a 3.0 GB partition... So there is clearly no need for a new hard disk yet.

This morning I switched my website from PHP Nuke to Drupal.

Most work in the migration was writing a script to transfer the articles, specials, book reviews and comments from one database format to another. The script converted 121 users, 1693 stories, 42 book reviews, 30 topics, 65 specials and 1999 comments.

Now there is a lot of tweaking to be done over the next couple weeks. It's great fun to get to know Drupal, and I'm really happy with my choice.

After a long, long day the migration is as good as ready. Tomorrow morning I only need to switch the settings in my Apache server, copy some pictures to their new location and the new site will take the old site's place.

Feel free to take a look:

http://test.guusbosman.nl

Here are the things I need to do before switching this site to Drupal:

1. Fix bug in ordering comments (reuse code from system update 172)
2. Migrate subtitles of Specials
3. Add log message and use correct creation date in node_revision for story & page
4. Migrate hostname of anonymous comments
5. Migrate private attribute of stories
6. Configure RSS feeds. Strictly speaking this can wait till after the migration but I want to be sure I know what's involved.
7. Set the creation time of book reviews
8. Filter out "Re:" in comment titles
9. Filter out in stories

Last week уе have been testing with the trial version of the new site. Jaap, Jean-Paul, Jerry, Mieke and Rob have found a couple of problems and suggestions for improvements.

Here's is what they found:

1. Bug: the Recent Comment block doesn't show an author.
2. Bug: The order of the comments looks strange. "I don't get the order of the comments. As I watch this news item, the comments don't look ordered by date. Do they? Should they?".
3. Feature request: Use a default image for users that don't have an image & anonymous users.
4. Feature request: perhaps it's useful to be able to delete your own comments.
5. Bug: The signature (for comments) doesn't really work nice: you always have to "move it aside" before you can start typing a comment. The cursor isn't placed on a useful place.
6. Feature request: It would be nice if the signature is visually separated from the comment by a line or something.
7. Bug: Preview doesn't show HTML code.