Flutterby™! : Thanks for exercising the comments! 2000-03-15 23:23:06+00

Thanks for exercising the comments!

2000-03-15 23:23:06+00 by Dan Lyke 6 comments

Thanks, y'all, for exercising the comment engine! Don't worry about the duplicate entries, maybe I'll try to cull them, or maybe I'll just leave 'em as a testament to why we should check our user interfaces a little more thoroughly before we release 'em on the unsuspecting. I'm bailing out some folks today and tomorrow, and gonna be vacationing in Carmel Friday and the weekend, but I can see that I need "delete", "edit", and "new comments" features fairly quickly, and I've gotta fix whatever's putting default text in the entry boxes. I also need to make the URL to "do.cgi" more consistent even when I'm using "post" to do navigation, you should be able to bookmark anywhere. Other note 'cause it's come up: The code that allows HTML has been through several incarnations, at one point it was pretty good about making sure misentered tags got matched, and it doesn't allow all tags through (Eric tried to execute "rm -r /tmp/*" server side includes, you also should be safe from JavaScript hacks, not that any of you are foolish enough to have that turned on). On a social engineering side, I want to try to make ongoing discussions some sort of threading between weblogs, encouraging longer articles and rants rather than just glib quips traded back and forth here. Any suggestions on that would be appreciated.

Hmmm... How 'bout an XML based trans-blog commenting system. For instance, I can post a comment to your blog that becomes an entry into my blog, then comments to my comment stay hosted on my blog... BTW, are you doing any session tracking? I had a really nice set of C functions written at McKee Foods for doing session tracking and maintaining variables in an Oracle database. The stuff people talk me into doing sometime baffle me... Also, I original thought about exec'ing "rm -r /*" but I figured I'd be nice in case it did work.

My original thought for this was just allowing links, if you linked to the right sort of XML document it'd get imported and shown inline, I'm still thinking about that. I'm not doing session tracking right now, I considered it, but I didn't really feel comfortable doing that before the user logged in (afterwards... fair game!). As I get further and further into replacing the core function of the web server with the CGI stuff I might get there.

It's kind of ironic how you start transitioning from Web Server + CGI to Content Management Scripts that repond on port 80... If you're interested, I have my version of the TinyHTTPD - the Perl web server (it's only about 200 lines). I added threads, better environment variable handling and cookie handling to the original. I kind of wanted to setup a site to resurrect it but I'm being dragged further and further away from Perl...

Gee, Eric, you're a manager now, you shouldn't be writing code... I did want to keep this running under Apache and mod_perl because I wanted something similar to the ACS that would run on cheap hosting. Although since it's all being set up as fairly independent Perl modules, making them talk to a different server shouldn't be a big deal. Wendell, was your empty comment something I screwed up?