Software Artisan

I’ve been using this blog as a way to talk about my adventures in programming, but as of late I sound like a broken record. I don’t have time to explore new things like I used to, and right now I’m in the process of pounding out code. It’s not active design, nor am I in control of the project any more. Times cycle, and I may be in that position again—even soon. However, I have a creative outlet with my photography. There’s different things you can do in the darkroom, new experiments to try with developing, etc.

I’m going to focus on my hobby, where I have most of my fun. All the old articles are still here, and won’t be going anywhere. I did want to give fair warning, knowing I’ll lose some of my audience. You may enjoy it if you stick around, so let’s all have fun and enjoy ourselves.

It’s an Apache plugin designed to drastically cut down on spam. We’re talking referrer spam, comment spam, etc. It checks URL parts, submitted content, etc. I was quite surprised to find out about it, because I didn’t sign up for it. It was preconfigured with my host, TextDrive. I found out because I was writing a blog entry dealing with OpenID, and my personal plans for using it. When I submitted the article the server responded with a mysterious “Precondition Failed” message. I was sure Typo was to blame for it. Apparently there was something (I couldn’t tell you what right now) that caused mod_security to kick in and reject my post.

Rather than trying to find out what the protected words are, particularly since they will likely change, I’m going to try and have mod_security lifted only for the content editing portion of Typo. I really want it’s protection for comment spam and referrer spam. If it’s an all or nothing proposition (remember that Rails apps are proxied through Apache, and the .htaccess file is not read), then I will have to live with the mod_security restrictions.

I may have to resort to doing everything through the blog web service. We’ll see how it goes. So, if any of you types a comment and instead of seeing it on my blog you see some ominous “Precondition Failed” message it’s because you are trying to spam me! No seriously, it’s because you hit on a keyword that a bunch of spammers use.

It seems that I’m losing readers, probably because my new posts had more to do with Ruby than Java. I knew that I would probably lose some readership because I switched blogging hosts. It happens. It’s also for that reason why I waited to switch until I owned the domain and I was in charge of the blogging software. I do believe my content and my life belongs in my hands. I would like to formally thank JRoller for providing a free blogging service for so long. It was because of them that I got my thoughts out there. Despite the issues and frustrations over time, my real reason for switching is because I want to be in charge of my blogging future. If I want to change the application that serves up the blog, I want it to be seamless to my readers. That’s why I use Feedburner. That’s also why I simplified the number of feeds to one.

This blog will cover a number of concepts, most of which will be useful no matter what language you develop in. I happen to use both Java and Ruby. I may use more in the future. I’m not about to drop one language as a topic just like that. Sure my blogging software is built on Ruby on Rails and not Java. Yes, my host is tailored for that sort of thing. That doesn’t mean I’m abandoning Java. I’ll probably have a nice long post featuring Java next. As a teaser, I’ll let you know that it has to do with using enums for a Finite State Machine—the right way. Don’t go away just because things change. Have fun with me!

I’ve grown tired of being at the mercy of someone else’s opinion of blog hosting. I’ve grown tired of JRoller, and having my identity and my content out of my control. I’ve finally got my new blog software hosted on my own ISP. If there is something wrong I’m the one to blame. The good news is that I’m not going to have a service one day and then have it revoked the next.

I’ll post the details of how I got Typo working on TextDrive, because it was an ordeal. I’ll just do it in an article of its own. So why Typo and not one of the other blog applications? Partly, because I wanted to do something with Ruby on Rails but mostly because it was the most complete blogging tool I could find for the platform. I needed RSS feeds, XMLRPC support for blog posting clients, tagging, AJAX support, etc. Typo had all that out of the box.

All that remains is to properly customize my theme. I’m taking the opportunity to change everything. The blog is now “Software Artisan” to reflect the evolution of how I approach software projects. It will still be the eclectic view into my life, but instead of neatly compartmentalizing everything, I’m tagging it. I hope to get some really cool stuff here in the future. I’m debating whether I should just make a clean break from my past, or if I should attempt to import my old articles. I may import as many as fit on my old feed, and let the rest simply disappear. It’s a new blog, with a new history. It’s my content.

Yoroshiku Onegai Shimasu (Please be kind to me)