My blog is, at this point, a vital part of my routine. I use my blog to write about my personal projects, I write about the non-restricted parts of my jobs, and I write about the work that goes into Gentoo Linux and other projects I follow.
I have over 2100 posts over time, especially thanks to the recent import of my original blog on Gentoo infrastructure. I don’t really know if it’s a lot, but sometimes Typo seems to miss something about it. Unfortunately I’m also running an older version of Typo, because I haven’t switched that virtual server to Ruby 1.9 yet as one of my customers is running a version of Radiant that is not going to work otherwise.
Said customer also bitched so hard, and screamed not to keep the site on my server, but as it happens the new webmasters that are supposed to pick up the website, and should have been cheaper and faster than me… have been working since June and still delivered nothing. Hopefully they’ll be done soon and I can kick said customer from the server.
Anyway, at this point there are a few things that I’d like to get out of my blogging platform in the future, which might require me to fork Typo and create my own version, which is likely going to be stripped down — as many things I really don’t care about, that are added here, like the short URLs, which I might just export as I think I used them at some point, but then I would handle through mod_rewrite rather than on the Rails side.
So let’s see what I don’t like about the current Typo I’m using:
- The database access is more than a bit messed up; it probably has to do that upstream only cares about MySQL, while I want to run it on PostgreSQL; and this causes more than a couple of problems — have you noticed that sometimes my posts end up password-protected? Well, what happens is that the settings for the single posts are serialized in YAML and de-serialized, but somethings something bad happens and the YAML becomes invalid, causing the password-protection to kick in. I know there is an ActiveRecord extension that allows for key-value pairs to be stored in PostgreSQL-specific column types instead of having to (de)serialize them all the time, but again, this wouldn’t be something upstream would use.
- Alternatively I’ve been toying with the idea of using MongoDB as a backend. Even with the issues that I have pointed out before, I think it might work well for a blog, especially since then the comments would be tied tot he post itself, rather than have the current connected tables.
- There is a problem with the tags handling, again something upstream doesn’t seem to care about – at some point I remember reading they were mostly interested in making every single word in a post a tag to cross-connect posts with the same word; it’s one of the reasons why I’m not sure if I want to update it. If I change the title of one of the tags to make it more descriptive, then I edit a post that has that tag, it creates one more tag for each word in that title, instead of preserving the older tags. I really should clean up the tags I got right now.
- I would also like that when I get to the “new post” page it would create it already and then get me back to editing it — this is important to me because sometimes if I have to restart Chromium, or suspend the laptop, something goes very wrong and it creates multiple drafts for the same post. And cleaning them up is a long task.
- A better implementation of notification for new posts, and integration with Flattr, would be also very good. While IFTTT makes it easy to post the new entries to Twitter and LinkedIn, its lack of integration for Flattr is a major pain, and the fact that right now, to use auto-submit, I have to duplicate part of the content in the HTML of the pages, is also a problem. So being able to create a “Flattr thing” the moment when I actually post something would be a major plus for me.
- Since I’m actually quite the paranoid, another thing I would like to have would be either two-factor authentication with Google Authenticator on a cellphone, or (actually, in addition to) certificate-based authentication for the admin interface. Having a safe way to make sure that I’m the only one logging in would make me remove some of the administrative interface rules on ModSecurity, which would in turn let me write posts from public WiFi networks sidestepping the problem I posted about the other day.
- Scheduled posting. This used to be supported, but it’s been completely broken for years at this point, but it was very useful to me a long time ago since I would just write a bunch of posts and schedule them to be posted once a day. I suppose this should now be changed so that the planned posts are only actually posted if a process is called to make sure that the new posts are now “elapsed”… but again this is something that I’d like to have, and you readers would probably enjoy, as it would probably make for more and better content overall.
I definitely do not want to go with WordPress, I just wish I had the time to write my own Typo fork, and make it more usable for what I do, rather than hoping that the upstream development for Typo does not go in a direction I don’t like at all.. Maybe somebody else has the same requirements and would like to join me in this project; if so, send me an email.. maybe it’ll finally be the time I decide to start on the fork itself.