Cottleston Pie

A certain someone has been prodding me to start blogging again, and my excuses have finally run out, so here's a random post to get started again with.

I've just cleared out four months' worth of caught spam (hooray for Habari's spam catcher!), and sorted through all the unapproved (mostly spam) comments. This "spamment" in particular made me smile, if only for its sheer cheek:

Please, do not delete the given message. Money obtained from spam will go to the help hungry to children ugandn

To all the hungry to children ugandn out there: I'm sorry, my finger slipped.

In other news, I've recently started to teach myself Python, and I've been amazed at how well it "fits my brain", as someone else once said about a programming language. Python is incredibly easy to pick up (at least if you already know the basics of programming), and I've found myself becoming quite at home with its idioms -- unlike when I tried Ruby, sadly. I'll have to give Ruby another try one of these years. Its class and inheritance syntax makes more immediate sense to me, that's for sure.

I've also upgraded Habari now, which was pleasantly painless to do. I'll make my own theme for it one of these days, when I've got something better to do.

Well, that happened sooner than I expected. I've switched from WordPress to Habari, and so far, I like what I see.

The default template is rather crufty, and it uses a loose DOCTYPE, but I was going to give this place a makeover anyway, so no big issue there. The PHP code looks considerably healthier than that in WordPress, and the use of PDO for database connectivity is reassuring, as the prepared statements and bound parameters should guard well against SQL injection attacks.

I had a slight issue when importing my WordPress data, because my WordPress user and Habari user both had the same name. Simply changing one or other username solved the problem, allowing me to import all posts, comments, and pages, and I was then able to delete the default Habari user, and make the imported WordPress user (and all of the associated posts) my primary account.

The spam detection is pretty good, even with using something like Akismet, and has only missed one so far - it had no links in it, and looked innocuous enough at a glance. Comment moderation is turned on by default, though, so that caught it. I'd like to see some way to set the options for the included spam plugin without having to edit the PHP file, and I hope that Habari introduces comprehensive options regarding commenting in a future release, such as auto-approving subsequent comments from approved posters (Habari might already do this, I don't know). There essentially are no options regarding comments at present, beyond a per-entry "Comments: yes/no?" choice. I also need to look at how it parses the comment body, and what markup it (doesn't) allow.

It's still rough around the edges, but the whole architecture of Habari feels more friendly than that of WordPress - I'm looking forward to further improvements from the Habari team in future.

Apologies in advance for any issues due to the switch - leave a comment on this entry if something doesn't work as expected, and I'll try to fix it.