I am just trying out Windows Live Writer. The setup seemed easy enough. I haven’t had any heavy use yet, but it seems neat for now.

Since I am no longer associated with OSU, my account will be removed soon. Time to migrate from wordpress/gallery2 to Windows Live Space. Anyone out there have a good idea as to how to do a mass migration?

Also upgraded WPG2 to 2.0. Things seemed to go smoothly.

It hasn’t been a serious problem till today in which I got over 100 spam comments. Did a little research and came across Akismet plugin for WordPress. It sends the comment through their website and determine if it’s a spam. Therefore there is no local blacklist to maintain which is quite convenient. Let’s see how well it works out.

I came across WPG2 the other day and thought it’s nice. So I gave it a try. It enables me to post images from gallery2. I used to do this by copying and pasting URLs and image source URIs, which is tedious. Another big problem with my old approach is I need to modify all posts once my gallery is moved (which will happen soon, I think).

The settings are a little tricky and not too well documented. Nevertheless, I figured it all out:

Refer to this page for adding photos to blog entries. Basically, it enables the wpg2 tag and you can use the album/picture name as the content. For example, plants/tulip2005/IMG_0918.JPG, and it would look like this:

I didn’t realized the problem until yesterday when I posted between 11pm and 12pm. The date showed was today. Then I realized it’s the problem with the time zone. I set time zone to UTC-7 when I set up this blog because it was day light saving time then. But we have now changed back to UTC-8. There is a time zone plugin that automatically changes the time zone for you. How nice! Check it out.

I was trying to upload pictures from the North Cascades trip but gallery2 seems to have stopped working, maybe due to the recent upgrade of our webserver (solaris to redhat). A little frustrated :(. Anyway, have emailed support and hopefully can get it done soon.

Our admin knocked at my door this morning telling me that my blog was hacked and compromised. This was really to my surprise. Why would anyone want to hack it? Weird. Anyway, I had to take it down and upgrade Wordpress and Gallery to the latest versions. But I am not sure what the security holes are and whether they are gone in the new versions. Updating is always painful. Fortunately, wordpress didn’t undergo too many changes. Just want to document the procedure here for future reference:

• Copy over wp-config.php
• Copy over fortune directory
• Copy over .htaccess otherwise URL rewriting wouldn’t work.
• Copy over the theme.
• Copy over the plugins
• Make changes to template-functions-post.php as I did for the last version
• Copy the smilies

For Gallery2, it’s a little bit more. Seems that it has undergone more changes. Did the upgrade, then follow the instructions to make URL rewrite work. The Veloria theme is gone and the new theme structure has changed a lot. So I am living with the default matrix theme now. Will fiddle later.

Below the header, I have added a block “quote of the day”. It is based on the notorious unix program fortune. I found the PHP script here.

I had to hack the theme a little bit to make it look nice. Code wise, changes were made in header.php. One drawback is the fortune data directory is relative to the PHP code that includes the script. So I have to either specify an absolute path or symlink under each directory that wants to include fortune.php. I currently have only two such directories, so not that bad.

Now it’s time to get interesting quotes and fiddle a little bit with the fonts and color.

After playing with WordPress a little bit, I am now slightly exposed to PHP. Generating HTML code with PHP does not seem to be fun, from my point of view, as a researcher in the area of meta programming. The text based approach is so ugly, clumsy and error prone. The generated code is basically not readable to human being. It is also very hard to get different modules to work together well.

Anyway, this is an ugly approach. It would be nice to have a functional HTML library based on AST. And of course, the first thing that comes to my mind is writing Haskell data type definitions, smart constructors and a pretty printer. Thus we can probably write a blogging platform using Haskell :). But I am not sure yet how to interact with databases. I currently have no knowledge in database. We probably will end up with heavy use of IO monad.

For now, there are some pointers I might want to refer to later:

• A Prettier Printer by Phil Wadler.
• HaXML. Since HTML is an application of XML, we certainly want to generalize. HTML might need some tolerence in validity though.
• HXML. This looks like a drop-in replacement of HaXML.

I need more information on:

• How to run a Haskell program as a CGI.
• How to interact with MySQL or other databases.
• Interaction with the system and IO in Haskell.