Sperrobjekt Weblog

To tell you what Blog Action Day is all about, I quote from the offical web site:

On October 15th, bloggers around the web will unite to put a single important issue on everyone’s mind - the environment. Every blogger will post about the environment in their own way and relating to their own topic.

So, it's about the environment, baby. As a user and promoter of Linux, especially Ubuntu, I'd like to share with you some thoughts about how environmentally friendly Linux is and/or could be. Let's start by pointing at the incredible amount of discarded electronics often containing dangerous toxic waste. No matter what brand of computers, our aim must be greener computers and entertainment electronics.

Power consumption increases with each new generation of desktop computers. Oftentimes, older hardware can still be used for fileserver or router work; a number of Linux distros are small, yet advanced enough to run on old machines. Thus, we need to produce less new hardware, which is also a power-consuming process. If you want to reduce power consumption of your high end Linux desktop system, you can try to install PowerTOP, a tool to measure power usage developed by Intel. Also check out all the tipps and tricks at LessWatts.org, a site dedicated to saving power with Linux.

Having said this, it is kinda sad that the next Ubuntu release Gutsy Gibbon that is due on October 18 will consume more energy than any of the older releases, despite the fact that it comes with a tickless kernel.

Conclusion: There is still a long way to go, but at least hardware as well as software developers are increasingly aware of the problem; and many are working to resolve it.

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

It's been silent here for too long, but that's because I have a lot of work to do on various projects. Other people are working, too. Two days ago, Dmitry Baranovskiy announced the release of Optimus, an online service that transforms microformatted XHTML pages to nice, clean, easily digestible XML, JSON or JSON-P. This is achieved by the informed and heavy use of XSL Transformations. Optimus currently filters out events (hCalendar), addresses (hCard), blog entries (hAtom), resumes (hResume), reviews (hReview), and many more, so every important Microformat is covered. The great thing is that Dmitry has released all the XSL and XML files required for the transformation (under this Creative Commons license, I figure?). This means that everyone can set up her or his own transformations. I can only start to think of all the good uses we can put this to.

See example Optimus output of the blog entry before this one.

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