Dave's Free Press: Journal

violence, pornography, and rude words for the web generation

 

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geeky politics rant silly religion meta music perl weird drinking culture london language transport sport olympics hacking media maths web photography etiquette spam amazon film bastards books bryar holidays cars palm telecoms travel yapc bbc clothes rsnapshot phone environment whisky security home radio lolcats deafness curry art work privacy iphone linux bramble unix go business engineering kindle gps economics latin anglo-saxon money electronics
Thu, 10 Mar 2011

Meet Bramble

Until recently, this 'ere blog was run using the excellent Bryar software, which I maintained after its original author stopped supporting when he stopped being a programmer and went off to Save The Heathen. Bryar fitted by needs and worked well, but it had several features that I just never used, and others that were never fully implemented. I added a few features that I wanted, but it was getting harder and harder to hack on as my needs diverged more and more from Simon's.

So a few weeks ago, I wrote my own replacement from scratch. It's called Bramble, because areas of bramble bushes are sometimes called a briar patch. You probably didn't notice when I deployed it, because it supports all the old URLs so nothing broke*. And by leaving out support for stuff that I never used anyway, it's become easier to add shiny new features. For example, it was about 30 seconds work to make it support wildcards in IDs, so if you want to see all my book reviews you can click here. Naturally, these views of the data are also available in RSS.

* you may have wondered why it re-published everything one night in the RSS feeds - that's because the canonical URLs of all my posts changed. They now look REST-ish, like http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david/journal/id/remixing-insanity instead of http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david/journal/index.pl?id=remixing-insanity. The old URLs will still work though.

Posted at 22:53 by David Cantrell
keywords: bramble | bryar | geeky | hacking | meta
Permalink | 0 Comments
Sun, 31 Jan 2010

Negative keywords

Nearly three years ago I added keyword support to this 'ere journal. Well, now it supports negative keyword filtering. So if you want to see posts that are not tagged "geeky", for example, here's the linky.

Posted at 12:38 by David Cantrell
keywords: bryar | geeky | hacking | meta
Permalink | 0 Comments
Thu, 28 May 2009

Bryar security hole

Someone on IRC reported a bug in Bryar. Namely that a Naughty Person can exploit the feature that notifies you of blog-spam by email to execute arbitrary code on your machine, as the user you run Bryar under.

A patched release is on the way to the CPAN, and you are strongly urged to upgrade.

Posted at 23:05 by David Cantrell
keywords: bryar | geeky | perl
Permalink | 0 Comments
Sun, 27 May 2007

New Bryar feature

I just added support for specifying keywords (which the cool kids call "tags") in your Bryar postings. Please see if you can break things while I test them on this journal.

Please note that I've not yet added keywords to my old postings. That will take quite a while to do, so please be patient. At the time of writing, keywords 'bryar' and 'whisky' should do vaguely useful things.

You can even subscribe to keyword RSS feeds, like this.

Posted at 22:35 by David Cantrell
keywords: bryar | geeky | hacking | meta
Permalink | 0 Comments
Sat, 20 Jan 2007

New Bryar release

As I've been promising to do for ages (it's over a year since Simon said I could take over maintenance of it, and several months since I promised Bob that he could have all the shiny new features I had planned) I've finally got round to releasing a new version of Bryar, the software what provides the brains behind this 'ere august journal.

The most important change is that I released the stuff for filtering out comment spam.

Posted at 22:02 by David Cantrell
keywords: bryar | geeky | hacking | spam
Permalink | 1 Comment
Sat, 1 Apr 2006

Welcome to the new Bryar thing

I'll now be writing my journal here instead of at Livejournal. All my old Livejournal posts are archived here for convenience, but with commenting disabled. You can, of course, still comment at the old site.

No doubt I'm going to break things a bit over the next few days.

Posted at 23:42 by David Cantrell
keywords: bryar | meta
Permalink | 0 Comments

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