kentcowgill.org/blog

Sweet.

It only took re-writing the thing from the ground up, switching out completely the modules I was using - but I finally managed to get that silly picture stripper/thumbnailer working again.

Were it not for Imager by Tony Cook or Email::MIME::Attachment::Stripper by Casey West (with my friend Yaakov recommending the former and perlmonks.org for the alternative to MIME::Parser) - I'd still be spinning my wheels.

During the debugging, I'd get MIME::Parser to appear to work, but then Image::Magick would stop working. Or MIME::Parser would fail me in strange and non-reproducibly ways but Image::Magick would faithfully render an incomplete image file.

But no more.

I've resolved to figure out why my photo uploader keeps cutting off my pictures I email from my phone.

It's driving me crazy - it used to work like clockwork. Snap a little photo with the phone, punch a few buttons, click click bang, and whaddaya know, my photoblog gets automatically updated. With a thumbnail and a picture that aren't broken.

I'm working on it as I write this, waiting for slow email to arrive at my server.

We'll see...

So, I'm a moron.

Seems I'm not making proper use of the Model:: modules. I had originally found an old out of date tutorial making use of the Class::DBI helper scripts, so that's what I used in making this blog. Problem is, the tutorial was woefully incomplete, AND CDBI seems to work - at the surface - without any additional configuration.

Except when you have a stupid datamodel that requires you join a table to itself and get a count of child rows for each parent row.

These days, using Class::DBI seems frowned upon by the catalyst community, so I think instead of trying to fix what's broken, I'll just use a different model to access my data - HOPEfully one that isn't woefully broken, lets me write some of my own nasty SQL and actually reference the correct results to stuff into TemplateToolkit.

Too bad I'm busy working on my wishlist, otherwise I'd tackle this issue straight away.

Ok, now I really need to concentrate on the formatting.

I think for now I'll just do some simple multiline substitutions. A single linebreak gets turned into a br tag, two linebreaks next to each other get turned into para tags (which of course means that the beginning of all entries get a para by default). Update: I'm just going to use Textile.

Next, HTML entities will go away. Cross site scripting anyone?

Maybe there's already a plugin for this... (Catalyst::Plugin::Textile?)

1. Add skin support
2. Add parent topics to the top of the view template, add links to the recent table to read more of the recent posts.
3. Maybe don't show "view" links for 0 replies?
4. Add a threaded view. This will involve some more advanced SQL.
5. Look into Class::DBI::Sweet - see if I can translate my single table join-to-itself query with Sweet - why junk up my code with ugly SQL?
6. add next and previous navigation once I get over 10 entries.
7. Move the SQL code to the Model object! :)
8. Continue to tweak the look & feel. Maybe move it from index.tt to the header.tt. Maybe instead re-think the templating system?

1. Fix formatting. Implement either WikiStyle or some other psuedo-html formatting. At the very least, encode line breaks. They're killing me. While I'm at cleaning up the input, how's about cleaning up the input? :-)
2. Add the no-cache header.
3. Add skin support.
4. Add a real threaded view?
5. Low hanging fruit: incorporate some better navigation, look & feel, left hand navigation, etc.

Ok, I'm not one for figuring out nasty SQL. I was about to ask my friend Devin to lend a hand, since he's really good with SQL. However, I was able to figure out what I was looking for, and that was:

   select a.blog_id,
     a.blog_parent_id,
     a.blog_title,
     a.blog_date,
     a.blog_authorname,
     a.blog_authoremail,
     a.blog_entry,
     count(b.blog_id) as child_count
   from blog a left join blog b
   on a.blog_id = b.blog_parent_id
   where a.blog_parent_id is null
   group by a.blog_id
   order by a.blog_id desc

And the result of that query counts the sub-comments for each main comment in the very blog you're looking at now ;)

These are some of the items on the current to do list. If you'd like to suggest some features, just click on the "Comment on ..." link at the bottom of this post.

1. Fix formatting, maybe parse text in a wiki fashion. Don't make the users type in HTML for things like bold, italics, etc.
2. Change the database schema to support child posts (for comments on posts).
3. Implement comments :-)
4. Add the no-cache header.
5. Maybe do some quality checks on the input, to make sure no crap gets put in.

The first time around, I was using a flat(ish) SQLite file, which worked just fine from my development platform, i.e. running the server as myself, connecting to it on port 3000.

All well and good, but once I moved the application over to running under mod_perl, I kept getting errors like "Can't open readonly file" "Can't open any file" etc. I was sure it was permissions, so I chown'd the database file to nobody, and iteratively worked up to chmod'ing it to 777 - even moved it to a more publicly accessible location.

I still don't know what it was. Instead, I moved my database schema over to a mysql database, regenerated my Model modules with the helper script, changed the Model module's references (before I refered to the Model module as blog::Model::CDBI::Blog, but I had to change that to blog::Model::CDBI::mysql::Blog in two places in my Controller - but other than that, *every*thing else worked flawlessly, including the ability to add new posts :-)

this is a test to see if the 'ole MVC framework really delivers on the promise - i just pulled the model rug out from under it without changing any other code... does it work? can i add entries to my new shiny database?

Ok, once again I'm burning the midnight oil trying to digitize the whole of my experiences on the ride. Or at least the 11:30pm oil. Whichever.

So I've put up the beginnings of my journal, but please keep in mind that I'm typing this stuff out as fast as I can!

I've also starting putting captions on my pictures because I suppose I just felt like doing a lot of typing ;)

Enjoy for now, and I'll post more when I can :)