Dented Reality Notes

You may or may not have noticed, but the posting times on this blog have changed recently, because I installed the excellent blosxom timezone plugin, written by Raffi Krikorian.

It was wonderfully easy to configure, all I had to do was put in my own timezone, and it works out all times for posts based on the timezone of the server, in relation to mine.

In case you didn't notice, all my blosxom plugins are working again!

Now that that is taken care of (ended up being a naming conflict within a plugin), I can eventually get around to doing what I had actually intended on doing, which is upgrade to the official release verion 2.0 of blosxom, and then implementing some more plugins to create better RSS feeds and probably sub-topic menus within the templates to aid in navigation of the sections.

Thanks to phpwebhosting.com (my web host) for giving me access to an error_log, even if it's only a shared one across the whole server :)

Well, Fletcher has been flying away at the karma plugin we discussed and has got a version 0.3 going already. This one has the following features;

1. Show number of visits/votes
2. Show positive and negative votes
3. Show Controversy Index
4. Show Karma Index
5. Show Visits Index
6. Only show posts with minimum of 'x' for;
   1. Karma
   2. Controvery
   3. Interest

You can download karma 0.3 and drop it in as a plugin immediately. It's pretty self-explanatory if you understand the concept. To figure out the way that controvery and interest are calculated - have a look in the code for now, I'll post the formulae when I get a chance :)

I emailed the blosxom mailing list and suggested a new plugin, which I am just calling "karma". The idea was to allow people to click a + or - and indicate if they thought a post was good or not. This is similar to the system used on some other sites.

I got an email back from Fletcher Penney, who said that he'd develop it, and half an hour later we were chatting on MSN about the details. He's already knocked out 2 draft versions and we are sorting out some great stats and uses for the information!

blosxom and its developer-community rules!