Sperrobjekt Weblog

At the moment, a movement gains momentum in Germany that promotes extended user privacy, amongst other things by disabling the logging of IP addresses. This is partly due to a recent judgement pronounced by the Amtsgericht in Berlin that denies the German Federal Ministry of Justice the right to protocol any individual-related data about the visitors of their web site. Add to that the proposal of Minister of the Interior, Wolfgang Schäuble, to introduce a massive data retention legislation, and you know why, two weeks ago, about 15.000 people came together in Berlin to protest against the plans of politicians who, themselves, can hardly use a computer, but try to spread fear amongst the German population. Fear of a terrorist attack, that is.

Many individuals, groups, and parties are fighting back. One of them is the initiative Wir speichern nicht (We do not store) that asks webmasters and providers to abandon IP logging and/or anonymize their log files. They posted some tutorials on how to anonymize apache mod_removeip, WordPress, or MediaWiki (all in German, more here). While there are no instructions for Serendipity, Jens Ferner kindly provides us with directions of how to disable the logging of IP addresses of your visitors: Simply add

to the top of your serendipity_config.inc.php. Although I'm not sure if this covers all possible locations in the code (think of plugins e.g.), this is a first step. I disabled logging your IP for this blog, but I don't have access to the apache log files. Maybe this can be added to Serendipity either directly into the core or by way of a plugin.

Additional info in German (if anyone knows of good English tutorials or sites, please post those in the comments):Wiki des AK Vorrat, Infoseite, Wiki der Piraten-Partei, Pressemitteilung

I almost forgot: Today, according to schedule, Garvin released version 1.2 of the world's best blog software, Serendipity. This release features many improvements concerning templating, features, usability, and security. One major step forward is the new bulletproof template that enables us to use Smarty for the backend as well. As you can see, we're on the right track. The upgrade went flawlessly, so I want to say a big thank you to all developers who contributed to this release.

I've fallen deeply in love with JavaScript libraries like jQuery in the past months. There's so much cool stuff you can do by simply including one ore more .js files to your web site. Be it form validation, GUI-like elements, or just toggling the visibility of block elements. Image overlay effects like Lightbox or Thickbox are based on these libraries, too.

So I decided it was about time we had those libs in Serendipity. We need them to create a more intuitive user experience both in the frontend and the backend. Especially in the backend, where other blog tools like Movable Type 4 look much slicker to me. Anyway, I sat down and hacked together a new plugin for S9y that lets you include jQuery and some of its plugins, mootools (including many extensions in one file), and Prototype in your web site. You can choose between frontend and backend display and select single plugins for jQuery (my favorite lib right now). I would really appreciate it if some S9y users/developers would download and install the plugin and give me feedback on it (forum seems to be down, but there's already a thread on this).

To give you an idea of what could be done with it, I edited the default admin templates, got rid of all the tables and exchanged them for divs. Then I added some tabs to the "edit entry" area with the help of the tabs plugin for jQuery. You can see the result if you open the s9y_tabs.ogg of the desktop session I recorded with Istanbul (in Ogg Theora format, no sound).

"jQuery, mootools, Prototype in Serendipity" vollständig lesen

My reason for attending this sessions: What can we, Serendipity users, learn from Movable Type 4? Any cool new features inthe backend and so on. Ok, here weg go:

• MT4 is open source (MT3 wasn't)
• Navigation menu at the top
• Media upload via a Lightbox like overlay
• Images can be tagged, too
• Extended entry via tabs, reduces space
• Rich text editor with the options to display HTML, Textile etc. (this might be useful for some)
• You can restrict HTML tags for comments
• Stats on the admin area frontpage: daily/monthly posts, comments, tags, visits (via plugin)
• Categorize audio and video media files ("assets")
• The multiblog functionality looks great; spam comments can be weeded out for all installed blogs with one click

Conclusion: There doesn't seem to be anything in MT4 that S9y can't do or can do even better ;O) But the backend is slicker than S9y's admin area, I must admit. Anway, I really should do a S9y session on my next BarCamp because almost noone knows about its great features. The plugin system (Spartacus) seems to be the stand-out feature and is connected to S9y by others. So we (S9y users and devs) should see to it that it remains this way, and we should try to improve the backend. But a lot of work in this field is undertaken right now, e.g. plugin administration.

Thanks to Jan Theofel for his presentation.

Users of Serendipity, the fine blog software, rejoice! Garvin announced that he is writing the first book on Serendipity, and it will most likely be a comprehensive manual of the world's best blogging tool. The Book will be published by Open Source Press in early 2008, and it's going to be in German. But, Garvin already plays with the idea to write an English version, too. That's very good news for the whole S9y community and, hopefully, is going to increase S9y's popularity even more.