2/9/2012 - Added GeSHi - Generic Syntax Highlighter

I added a new shortcode tag using GeSHi

You can now use the shortcode [code:lang] or [code language='lang']

For example you can use the SQL language, ([code:sql])

--
-- SQL example for GeSHi
--
 
DROP TABLE IF EXISTS foo;
CREATE TABLE foo (
  id INT(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  characters INT(11) DEFAULT '0',
  time_taken DOUBLE DEFAULT NULL,
  language_used VARCHAR(100) DEFAULT NULL,
  SOURCE text,
  time_highlighted datetime DEFAULT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY  (id)
) TYPE=MyISAM

There is a comprehensive list of languages available, but most of the basic languages are included.

1/25/2012 - Comment changes

I made some minor changes when it comes to comments

1. No URLs will be allowed in the title of the comment, (if allowed to have titles).
2. The number of URLs in the body of the comment will now be limited, (the number will vary depending on various parameters of the poster).

Let me know if you come across any issues.

1/25/2012 - Secure Facebook login

If you have a secure Facebook account, (I think it is a requirement now?), you can now login to facebook, (or even create a new account using Facebook).

This is the secure site, https://www.journalhome.com/, over time I will update all the links, (internal of course), to be 100% secure, I just want to make sure that everything runs fine for a while.

Visit us on our Facebook page.

1/24/2012 - Updated Daffi template

I finnally fixed the Daffi template, it was very outdated and, to be fair, completely broken.

It is now a bit wider and allows for most/all plugins to be entered.

Click on the image to see what it looks like.

I am still, (yes still!), working at converting some wordpress themes, this is taking a lot longer than expected, but at least the work is slowly progressing.

Let me know of you have any other templates you want me to look at.

1/18/2012 - Supporting anti-SOPA Blackout day

On the Tuesday 24th January 2012, the US Senate will vote on the Internet censorship bill.

Whilst it is an American law, it has far reaching repercussions for the web as a whole.

The bill will affect us all, and the way we all use websites.

1/14/2012 - Friday the 13th updates

Hi,

I laughed in the face of Friday the 13th and made some minor updates

New items:

1. I updated the tinyMCE editor to version 3.4.7, this is the default editor, (when no other plugins are active).
2. I updated CKEditor to version 3.6.2, you can activate that editor Dashboard > Plugins > CKEditor

Fixes:

1. Trackbacks were not working properly to say the least.
2. Minor tweaks in the background.

As usual if you see anything wrong, please give me a shout.

12/31/2011 - Happy new year!

It is already 2012 in some parts of the world and it is slowly getting to that time where we are...

2011 was full of changes for Journalhome, I have, (and in fact I am still busy doing it), re-written a lot of of the engine.
I know it was fustrating for some of you as everything did not always work as expected... I am aware that there are still some issues with some templates.

2012 should bring some visual changes, new templates, (a-la Wordpress), finally a new front page, (this one is 7 years old I think)!

So, I hope you have a wonderful and prosperous new year, filled with all your wishes.
If you are driving, be safe on the roads!

Happy and prosperous 2012 to all!

FFMG

12/16/2011 - The $5.00 mistake

I am in the process of making various updates and, although I am trying to be as careful as possible, some errors crept in.

Last night, (UK time), users were unable to create new entries for about 4-5 hours, the editor was just not working properly anymore :(. I fixed the issue as quickly as I could.

Sorry about this, please let me know if you come across any other issues that I might have missed.

In case you are wondering about the title, I had to put about $5.00 in the swear jar last night...

12/12/2011 - Where did my comments go?

We often get some questions about 'disappearing' comments.

What happens is no big secret, but rather a sign that we are not relying on technology as much as people think we are. You see, we have a spam bot running in the background, constantly evaluating entries, weblogs, and comments, (and a few other things). While it catches most spam on the spot, sometime it goes into 'safe mode' and asks for the comment to be moderated rather than risking making a bad decision.

While this is happening, a notification is sent to you, informing you that there is a new comment on your blog. Been the super efficient bunch that we are, we often review comments very quickly and delete it if need be.

This means that, by the time you come to read your blog, you find nothing more than tumbleweeds.

Note that we don't judge any comments, we only remove spam comments, nothing more, nothing less any other form of comments will have to be moderated by yourself. You can go to your account and delete the comments you don't wish to see.

Also note  that a copy of the comment is sent to you, if you feel that we were wrong, we will happily restore your comment...

11/16/2011 - Stand up against the Internet blacklist legislation

Today, (November the 16th), the US congress is discussing some form of Internet censorship bill.

Basically they want to be able to monitor and censor the content of the Internet, (to prevent piracy and copyright infringements).
This might sound like a noble idea, but in reality, anything you blog might be scrutinised and censor under some piracy cover.

Our servers are not located in the US so we would fall out of any such bills, but we still strongly believe that no government should be able to censor the Internet!
You can read more about it here.

10/18/2011 - Network update

There were some issues with the network this morning but it seems to have resolved itself, (somewhat worrying when those problems come and go).

At one point it looked like the Yahoo search engine robot had gone a bit crazy and was flooding the site, but I am not entirely certain that this was the issue.

I will keep monitoring it to see what the issue might be.

Sorry if you experienced some down time ...

[update 20/10/2011] I am still having some issues, I have disabled the statistics for now, so they will be a bit skew for a day or two ....

9/29/2011 - Very high server load

Something is putting a load on the server.
I am not 100% sure what the issue might be, ('cause I changed nothing in the last few days).

But please bear with me while I try and sort it out, I'll update this post once it is sorted.

[edit]:I have made a couple of changes to the scripts that were causing some issues, this seems to have sorted the problem for now, but I am monitoring the situation.

[edit2] : It's been a couple of hours and all seems good now. Please let me know if you have any major issue(s).

F.

9/21/2011 - Started facebook promotion - Part 2

This is a continuation of my earlier post on Facebook promotion.

I have now stopped the promotion to take stock of the results, (and because it was costing me a lot of money). There has been some signups directly from Facebook, (I can track those), but nothing worth the amount of money spent.

I ended up spending about 50 pound, (GBP), this was my budget for this experiment, each 'clicks', (that is users that saw the adverts and came to the sign-up page), cost between 0.2p and 0.8p, (I am not entirely certain why the cost varied so much, I suspect it has to do with the time of day).
So, I ended up with about 70 'visitors' and out of those, I got 4 or 5 sign ups.

As you can well imagine this is very expensive for such a low return.

So what next?

1. I'll wait a little bit and try Google AdWords.
   
   • I'll probably wait for the Google+ plugin to be finished...
2. Probably start some kind of competition, in other words, award the 50 pound to the best post, (per months or per week).
3. Wait to see if someone else has another suggestion.

*I like number 3 but I want to give google a fair chance to see what comes of it.

As always, any suggestions are always welcome.

9/17/2011 - Started facebook promotion

I have always been curious on how to advertise journalhome, the way I see it, there are only two realistic options.
Google Adsense or Facebook, I decided to go with Facebook because it is easier to choose the location, gender and user preferences.

I have a very modest budget, so we will see what kind of results we are getting, I am aiming for 1 'real' new blogger a day.

I will update this entry from time to time, to give a bit of feedback, the ad goes 'live' in about 2 or 3 hours, (when the US wakes up) and it is already live in Europe.

If you are a Facebook user please become a fan of JournalHome :), the more people we have the better.

(Update: see the result of my tinny exeriement and what I might do next).

9/4/2011 - August updates

1. Entry categories were not saved properly at all.
2. Tags can now be saved in drafts.
3. I turned bad-behavior off for a while, (mainly to test speed and load times)
4. I got rid of the 'Total members that have visited us in the last 24 hours: ...', it was ugly, slowing the db, and all in all not telling us anything very interesting.
   You are welcome to go on the stats page to have a look at who has/has not visited us.
5. I upgraded the default editor to version 3.4.4
   I fixed a bug that was causing the spell checker to not work properly, (for the record, we use Google spell check).
6. I re-wrote the messages section, just to make sure it looks a little better.

 I also updated the 'lifeless', 'forced energy', and 'exotic' templates, because they were ugly... I know there are others, but I am working on them slowly.

8/13/2011 - Bab-behavior not behaving?

For a while now I have been running Bad-behavior for a while now and I must admit I have never really noticed a major slow down in the number of spam registrations/entries. This is primarily because it is blindingly easy to fix whatever issue the plugin might find with your headers.

It does use some third party website like the project honeypot, but those has the down side of slowing this website at every page load.

I need to refine it to only check on certain pages, (like comments and signup), while having it turned off for other pages. I mean, realistically I couldn't care less if a spammer is reading the front page, (as long as they don't do anything else naughty).

So, I have turned it off for a while, this will help me to check 2 things.

- First how much faster is the site, (if at all!), and how much more spam I get. We, (the bots and I :)), are currently disabling no less than 500 to 1000 accounts a day!, so if the numbers get much higher than that then I will know that bad-behavior was helping in a way.

- Secondly, I have metrics to check the speed of the site, so I can compare how much faster it will be.

I will leave it like that for a week or so and then compare everything again...

If any of you have some kind of experience with Bad-behavior, (or if you know how to fine tune it to work faster/smoother/better).

8/6/2011 - How to test/debug your Facebook App

Over the past few weeks/month I have been adding various third party plugins to allow users to connect to Journalhome using their favourite social network account, (to date I have added Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin).

But one of the problems I have been facing is, how to debug/test my Facebook app. When you create an app, (on your facebook developer account), it is expected to redirect to your live server. The obvious solution is to create a new 'test' account.

So lets say your test account is http://127.0.0.1/, (or whatever IP address/website you use), create a new app in facebook using that address. Make sure that all the values are as close as possible to your 'live' server.

I have been having some issues with htpp://localhost/, I think this is because facebook tries to parse the URL and it doesn't like it, so it might be better to use the ip address.
It did work some times, but not always, but when you debugging you don't want to have it nor work 'sometimes'.

Pay special attention to the 'Web Site' section, make sure that the site URL points to your test website, (even if it is local and only accessible to you). Facebook uses this address to allow only applications from that address to make 'calls'.

Note your new Application ID and Application secret, they are obviously not the same as your live application details.

And that's all you need to do with Facebook really, (You can also use port number like http://www.example.com:6141/) if you need to.

You now need to create some test accounts, to do that, download the facebook test user manager, it will allow you to create test accounts, (and delete them/edit them/add friends). Just copy the files somewhere on your test server and run it from there, (like http://127.0.0.1/testuser/).

That's all you need really, just make sure that your test server is pointing to the 'test' version of your application and Facebook will return you back to your test server.

NB: This might be stating the obvious, but make sure that you replace the App ID and App secret when you nove to the live server. In my case I have config files that are 'live' and 'test' to ensure that I don't need to bother about changing the app ID and secret.

That's it, let me know if you have an easier way of testing Facebook apps. I am also very interested to know if there are other tools to help you test your Facebook app.

8/4/2011 - Changes over the past few weeks

1. Fixed an issue with the automatic ping functionality, (if the site had no title then you could not ping it properly).
2. Your blogs are now automatically pinging more services, (Google blogsearch in various languages, but not all).
   Some services have been dropped, either because they are too slow/offer poor service or simply because they want to charge for a service that is mostly free.
   I will update the list as time goes by but I will try and make sure we have at least 5 or 10 services been pinged at all time ...
3. Fixed some minor display issues if your blog had a lot of entries, (the total number of entries was wrong).
4. Blogs with looooots of entries/post every month now have a paginated archive. This should not affect most of you, but some more than 100 posts per month, (yes they do!), so the archive now paginate for them.
5. Tag, some clever spark thought it would be funny to have a massive amount of tags in one of their posts. So now I have had to limit the number of tags to 100 per posts and the length of each tags is also limited, (for the life of me I cannot see what they were trying to do).

That's all for now, please let me know if you come across any issue that I might have missed.

7/23/2011 - Back to normal... kind of.

After the spam attack we had last week things are slowly getting back to normal.

It has nothing to do with spammer giving us a break, what really happened is that I changed the blog signup page, (to be a bit more user friendly), and the various spam bots that have been flooding us are now hitting the wrong page(s).
I fear that once those bots are updated we will be hit with the same amount of spam. But I will deal with it has it happens, (I am watching the events very closely).

I know I have said it many times before, but I am very happy with the way our own anti-spam bot is working, it is catching a huge amount of spam, a vast amount of accounts are flagged a 'untrustworthy' by the system and I not getting the search engine links they so desperately want.

I am manually looking at all the accounts created, but +7000 accounts were created, (and I have automatically disabled +3000), so I still have to remove a lot of them.

I am also very happy with the way the system itself handled the attack, the front page went down once or twice, (under the load), but I have learned from it and we should now be able to handle further such attacks.
Those of you that have been around for a long time will know how badly the server used to behave under higher than normal loads.

All this has taken me away from the other improvements I have been working on, so, sadly there isn't much else new happening in the development front.

Let me know if you have any issues you want me to look at...

7/14/2011 - Weathering the spam storm

Just a quick note to let you know that we have been under a larger than usual spam attack over the last 2-3 days.
The spam bot is still doing its job, (and doing it rather well I think ), but it is taking a bit longer than usual, (only because of the volume of spam).

So please bear with me, (and the bot), for a few days, I am sure they will move on as soon as they realise that their garbage is not allowed to remain here. I will probably remove all 'new' weblog from the frontpage, just to make sure that they won't pollute the site any more than they do already.

Also remember to report any weblog that you feel is not appropriate or if it should be removed. A vast amount of older weblogs are not flagged as spam simply because the spam bot is still running in ‘cautious’ mode, (as some of you are all too aware).