Thursday January 20, 2005

Holy Macros RollerMan!

JunkFood has two excellent posts on hacking Roller. The second one (the most recent) in particular levels valid criticism of Roller's documentation. At one point is was better documented, what variables were available, which macros, the interesting values and methods of the data classes. But that has all fallen woefully out of date.
( Jan 20 2005, 05:06:09 PM ) Roller Permalink
Trackback: http://www.brainopolis.com/roller/trackback/lance/Weblog/holy_macros_rollerman

Friday January 14, 2005

Comment Spam Management

I finally got hit by a significant spam attack, though not as bad as many I've read about. Since Roller doesn't have good mass-comment management (it's on the list) I cobbled something together in my Latest Comments page. You might need to customize it (particularly the <form> action) and it sometimes throws exceptions. So use with care, if you dare. Finally, if you do use it you will end up on the Edit Weblog page with a partial entry - DO NOT save anything here, just click back to Latest Comments or to your front Weblog page. And note that the Pages might be cached so may not reflect comment deletion.
( Jan 14 2005, 10:01:34 AM ) Roller Permalink
Trackback: http://www.brainopolis.com/roller/trackback/lance/Weblog/comment_spam

Thursday September 30, 2004

Better now and busy. Back on the 5th of August I wrote about a couple spam problems I was having. Shortly afterward I rolled the new functionality into Roller (a Roller-wide Referer-Spam list), and I used it to block requests with those referers (they get a 403 Denied).

My site has continued to be stable ever since then and I haven't seen nearly so much CPU usage. Sadly, I've been very busy with work and family the last month and haven't had time for much of anything, let alone more Roller enhancements.
( Sep 30 2004, 06:55:22 AM ) Roller Permalink
Trackback: http://www.brainopolis.com/roller/trackback/lance/Weblog/better_now_and_busy

Thursday August 05, 2004

Referer Spammer Management in Roller

As it stands now, each user is responsible for maintaining their own Referer Spam blocking list. I do this fairly religiously, but my wife does not. Her blog doesn't seem to attract as much spam as mine, but why shouldn't she benefit from my list? I think I'll add a Roller-wide blocking list to my To-Do list.
( Aug 05 2004, 11:00:25 AM ) Roller Permalink Comments [2]
Trackback: http://www.brainopolis.com/roller/trackback/lance/Weblog/referer_spammer_management_in_roller

Tuesday July 27, 2004

Improved Search

Earlier tonight I committed a long-desired Search improvement: Paging. The results are broken into pages of 10 entries. Try this search.

At the top you‘ll notice a new select list labelled “Restrict by Category“. This allows the user to select a category to narrow the results. Also, after each entry is a link “restrict search to just this blog“ which will narrow the search to that entry‘s user and display in that user‘s template.

If you scroll to the bottom you‘ll see “1 | 2“ which are links to the pages of results. This is the href for “2”:
http://brainopolis.dnsalias.com/roller/search?q=help&username=&n=10&o=10.
The ‘q‘ is the query, ‘username‘ is obvious and optional. ‘n‘ is the number of results to display on each page, and ‘o‘ is the offset (the current page is displaying items 0–9). If ‘o‘ is greater than the # of results it gets reset to 0, so no thinking you can dink around and break it!

So you can play around with this href a bit and get different paging.

I haven‘t added the necessary velocity code to individual pages yet, so currently this is limited to the sitewide search only.

favicon and a simplified display

I love it when users post about how they've customized Roller.
( Jul 27 2004, 08:28:44 AM ) Roller Permalink
Trackback: http://www.brainopolis.com/roller/trackback/lance/Weblog/favicon_and_a_simplified_display

For further reading on today's posts:

Blogging Roller : Lance has been working on improving Roller's search interface and making numerous other fixes.

Monday July 19, 2004

Template Decorators in Roller

Last week on the Roller-Dev mailing list I promised to post an example of the "decorator" support I'd built into Roller. This functionality was inspired by Matt's post about supporting SiteMesh decoration in Roller. While I don't know if this could truly be called a Decorator, it does at least approximate what SiteMesh does (for Velocity).

To demonstrate I put together a page to display the most recent comments for Vanity Foul. Besides implementing a Latest Comments page I also created a Decorator page (_mydecorator) to wrap the page in a familiar look. By specifying #set( $decorator = "_mydecorator" ) in my Latest Comments page I inform Roller of which Decorator to use (currently it defaults to a "no-op decorator").

See the Pages:
• _mydecorator
• Latest Comments

Wanna see how I wrote that View Source Page?
BTW: I know the layout html is ugly, but I "inherited" the HTML, didn't design it myself. I keep telling myself that I'll get around to improving it....

Update: I like this idea so much I converted my To-Do List and Wish List to use the Decorator as well.
( Jul 19 2004, 10:16:52 AM ) Roller Permalink Comments [2]
Trackback: http://www.brainopolis.com/roller/trackback/lance/Weblog/template_decorators_in_roller

For further reading on today's posts:

Raible Designs ~ We Build Web Apps : The Beauty of SiteMesh Category: Java I'm pumped that I recently switched from Tiles to SiteMesh in AppFuse . Not only was it easy to learn when I integrated it into Equinox , but it easy to replace Tiles with SiteMesh in AppFuse. The best part of SiteMesh is once you have it setup and configured, you rarely have to muck with it again - it just works. In fact, it's so non-obtrusive that when I re-worked all AppFuse's tutorials last week, I was a...

Friday July 16, 2004

RSYA

Or "Referer Spamming Yet Again". The issue of referer spam has come up again, so I'll repost about my referer-spammer list. I've been listing it in XML, but I see now it will be more valuable to the Roller community as a comma-delimited list (suitable for copy-pasting straight into your own Spam Prevention box).

Also worth mentioning is that Roller supports directly deleting Referer Spam, using the Weblog::Referers tab.
( Jul 16 2004, 10:14:29 AM ) Roller Permalink Comments [1]
Trackback: http://www.brainopolis.com/roller/trackback/lance/Weblog/rsya