June 26th, 2003:

In a 6-3 decision, the United States Supreme Court declared a Texas State law banning private consensual sodomy between same-sexed individuals to be unconstitutional. There are currently five states that prohibit such activities. There are an additional nine states that prohibit sodomy between heterosexuals and homosexuals alike. This decision renders those laws unconstitutional as well. [via Mark Pilgrim]

With this ruling in place, consenting adults can do it in any way they please… legally. In honor of the return of rights we should have never had taken away in the first place, I hereby declare today, June 26th, sodomy day. In honor of this ocassion, consenting adults are urged to get out there and do it anyway they’d like — oral, anal… anything but the way God intended.

And by all means, post pictures showing your support.

Just so that this is documented somewhere, below is my wishlist for bBlog. Some of these things are so trivial a monkey could implement them. Some of them are so specific to my needs that no one else would ever use them. Others would require so much recoding it might not be worth it. A few of them, are actually useful and doable. Regardless, here is the list.

• The ability to send specified TrackBack pings with each new post.
• The ability to receive TrackBack pings on each post.
• The ability to connect a TrackBack URL to a category and have that item pinged everytime a new post is made in that category.
• Auto location of all TrackBackable items that are linked to in a post.
• Allow comments to be turned off on a post (either from the beginning, or after a period of time).
• A function to GetComments.
• A function to get the next entry.
• A function to get the previous entry.
• A function to get the next entry in a cateogry.
• A function to get the previous entry in a cateogry.
• A method of creating a plugin that will interact with a post after it has been posted.
• The ability to create a list of TrackBack URLs that are commonly pinged, so they can be selected when making a new post instead of having to type them out each time.
• Paging in the admin archives list.
• Paging in the admin comments list.
• A listing of the comments on each post when editing it in the admin interface.
• A different method of providing configuration information to the application. Requiring a database hit is a lot of overhead for something that rarely changes. Additionally, setting and accessing them via define is not the best way to go.
• Separation of functions in bBlog.class.php so that the comments stuff is in a comments class, and the weblog stuff is in a weblogs class, and the database stuff is in a database class. Smarty’s register_object function comes in handy here.
• The ability to hide a category from the category list.
• The ability to access the posts by name instead of by number (or in addition to).
• A more abstracted comments module that doesn’t require $_POST[] and/or $_GET[] to be populated, but instead relies on that information being passed to it as a parameter. This makes it easier to export certain things via XML-RPC or to use them in ways the author hadn’t intended.
• Paging on the index page.
• Support for binary attachments to any post.
• The ability to MOVE a comment into a thread in the event that someone doesn’t do this correctly.
• The ability to subscribe to receive an email for new comments on a post by post basis, for an entire category, or for the weblog as a whole.
• Completion of the email comment notification code.
• The removal of all English and HTML from non-template files. This includes the word “Posted” in the since function and the words “One” and “comment” in the comments module.
• Conditional GET support.
• A spell checker.
• A search function.
• Cookie based user data storage to save users from having to type it in every time.

I’m sure this list will change in time… but that’s it for now.

I’m sure you’re wondering, so I’ll tell you. The new engine behind revjim.net is bBlog. My setup isn’t stock, but it’s close. Let me go over some of my changes.

Of course I’m not using the default templates — I’ve rewritten them all to my liking. It’s fairly easy to do given the flexible nature of the template engine behind bBlog: namely, Smarty. I’m using the cleanurls option, which isn’t something you can turn on with a single click. It takes a little configuring to get it going. Additionally, I threw away the included rss.php file, and just used Smarty to handle that as well. It seemed like the right thing to do. The “comments” urls and the “archive” urls are also not included. However, they are pretty easy to do. Just copy the “item” script (which is used when you enable cleanurls) and modify it to do whatever you need to do. By creating additional template files (aside from post.html, which is what is called by item by default) you can have different URLs call different template files. This is exactly what I’ve done.

I don’t use the {posts} block provided by bBlog, and instead use the {getrecentposts}, {getarchiveposts} and {getpost} functions, which are all included (thanks to my CVS commits) with the bBlog source and are self documenting via the admin control panel. For my needs, those functions work better than the block functions.

Additionally, I’ve added in email support, so that commenters can receive notification of replies. This isn’t in CVS, because I just added it quickly so that it would work and, because of that, it isn’t fully templateable (yet) — the subject line and message body are hardcoded in English, currently.

I wrote a small script to convert all MovableType Categories, Posts, and Comments into bBlog. Some information in MovableType is ignored, such as the “excerpt” and “extended entry” information, because bBlog doesn’t support it (yet!). Additionally, TrackBack data was NOT moved over. As soon as bBlog supports TrackBack, I’ll modify my script to include the conversion for that as well. If you’re interested in using the script, let me know and I’ll send it to you. It isn’t very clean (you have to edit the source and configure it manually) and it only supports MySQL based MovableType blogs, but it’s useful anyway.

Let me know if you have any questions regarding how it works, or how to use it for your own needs. I’d be more than happy to help you along and show you the ropes. If you’re a control freak, like myself, I bet you’ll like it.

Jess and I are house-sitting for my parents in Keller while they go on a short vacation to New Mexico. They should be back Sunday night.

It’s very odd to live in this house again. My bed isn’t here anymore, so we’re sleeping in my parents bed (with clean sheets, thank you very much). Everything here is very familiar, and yet very different at the same time.

At one point, Keller was in the country. There was nothing here. Nothing at all. One grocery store, one movie rental place (and it wasn’t even a BlockBuster). This place has grown up a lot. Regardless of that, it’s still more country than anywhere I’ve lived in the past 8 years. The nights are darker, and quieter. Yet, in that quiet and darkness, there is so much light… so much noise. It’s beautiful.

My drive to work, however, has gone from 2 minutes, to about 45. So I’d better get in the shower and get the day started.