I’ve managed to get Pligg to use Redbrick’s PubCookie to authenticate logins. For the moment, you can see it in action here. However, this was done for demo purposes so I don’t know if it’ll stay there forever.
I reused the approach that worked for integrating MediaWiki with PubCookie for our Redbrick Wiki. This was based on the work originally described here.
I’ve only tested this with Pligg Beta 8.1.0. I believe future versions may have a better approach for external authentication so I can’t guarantee this will work with future versions.
Read More…
Being a proud Redbrick member, I keep up to date on all the Redbrick blogs on Planet Redbrick. Last week I saw this post by lickylip. I thought I’d highlight it a bit by posting about it here.
He’s recently married and living in their most-of-the-time quiet estate. Then you have a few of the local kids who decide to throw eggs and stones at their house and burn out their car when they go on holidays! Feckers. The Gardai are powerless of course and there isn’t much recourse fro them.
I really feel for them, because we’ve just moved recently and even though we’ve been here a few weeks, we don’t really know anyone yet. I don’t know what we’d do if we became victimised in the same manner because we’re both exhausted from moving again and wouldn’t like to think about the safety of our two year old daughter.
I didn’t think Dublin was still so bitter about “blow-ins”. I mean, I’ve moved house/apartment three times now, from City Centre to Kildare and now to Wicklow, and we’ve always found the locals fine. It’s nearly a necessity in Dublin these days that people are forced to move where they can afford.
While I completely dislike the idea of ASBOs, I guess they were designed to try and tackle the situation faced by lickylip.
For literally years, I’ve been trying to figure out what I want to do with my web space. At the moment it’s a dump for anything I’d like to keep online or be able to reference online such as my weird and wacky writings, my pleasant amateur art and various pieces of software or code I’ve done. And thats enough for me, I think.
However, I was interested in blogging software before the word “blogging” became hip. I didn’t blog, I just used the software from GreyMatter to MovableType and now Wordpress (which now runs this site). So the question haunts me (only a little though)… why I don’t I really blog and who reads this anyway?
Read More…
Over the recent months I’ve been flooded with comment spam. I setup Wordpress to put all comments in moderation to prevent defacing my site… that led to getting 50 or so emails a week (and sometimes a day) about comments awaiting moderation. Real comments, though far and few between, were being swamped to the point I didn’t have the time to filter them and let them pass.
With Wordpress 1.5 comes Akismet, a spam plugin. Unfortunately I couldn’t get it to work on Redbrick. I got my Wordpress API key, but it just wouldn’t accept the key. I emailed them and checked their logs and the Wordpress forums. No good. The recommended solution was to change servers!
So I’ve been on the hunt for a decent Spam plugin for Wordpress and low and behold I cam across Spam Karma 2. Since yesterday, when I installed it, it has gobbled up all the comment spam so far recieved (which was about 10 comments). Good stuff. No more nasty comments about casinos, hotels, diy stores, drugs and even less savoury stuff.
I managed to take this photo of a strange occult ritual being performed in Dublin. Whats worse several Redbrick members were involved; duke, tomo, dshagins, dimples, p zircon and grimnar… I overheard mention of werewolves. We’re they trying to summon such a monster?
Nearly a year ago (maybe even longer) I had a discussion with another Redbrick member: Duke. Even though we had completely different view points, we still wanted to talk about certain topics without having to defend our opinions. I mean he is a scientist very much so, while I’ve been called a “New Age Freak” by my own wife.
I guess I’m getting old because I’m not as willing to talk about my beliefs in public, especially not with work-mates and ironically not on my webpage either. In the last few years I’ve even found the Redbrick Boards a tiresome place for such discussion. Actually there is no discussion of these kinds of topics because it always boils down to having to defend your beliefs from the “scientific right”. It’s not that I have a problem with Science(tm), in fact I don’t. I would even defend science. Nor is it that I feel my beliefs are threatened because of some scientific-based belief. It just gets wearisome. Perhaps I’m misreading the ‘tone’ of some posters but I do sense a certain “zealousness” when I read replies to posts I make on several specific topics. I guess I should kilfile such folk but I rarely do, I like to see what others are saying even if I think the worse of them
So Duke and I brainstormed a bit and came up with an idea for a trusted redbrick member’s forum. Basically invite only. A place where you could discuss Wicca, Religion, Astral Project, Supernatural, Magick etc. without having to account for the chemical reactions in your brain. For some reason I felt the urge this year to set it up: Project Free Brick [www.redbrick.dcu.ie/~cammy/thefreebrick].
Unfortunately it’s seems to have flop so immediately. Next to nobody I contacted seemed interested. These kind of things need a ‘critical mass’ (evil business-speak.. *spit*) of people. Just look at the Redbrick Wiki I manage, which has a healthy number of contributors. Then see what happened to the occult wiki which ended up with me being the sole contributor. Three people do not make a forum.
If there is anyone out in the ether wilds of Redbrick who might be interested, feel free to sign up (use your Redbrick username so we know who you are).
Wordpress 2.0 has been released! Did anyone notice?
I’ve upgrade my site(s) though it took longer than usual. For installing/upgrading on Redbrick, see the Redbrick wiki article “Installing Wordpress on Redbrick”. I also had to debug and update the themes for all my sites. That was a pain.
The interface in WP2.0 is all AJAX now; works nicely in IE but in Opera the notifications and confirmation are a little misaligned and don’t disappear like in IE. I can’t get the spam plugin to work either. It won’t accept my Wordpress API key! Argg. Still, other than that it’s quite nice.
Now I have to go validate, debug and update my “TheDeadOne.net Original Theme”, “Wordpress and AXS Integration Plugin” and “Search and Replace Plugin” so they are compatible with Wordpress 2.0. A bit too much work really.
This is rather funky. If your a Wordpress user there is this nice plugin called X-Dashboard which allows you to configure the ‘dashboard’ on the Wordpress interface.
I only recently figured out how to get the Dashboard working properly on Redbrick (see the Redbrick Wiki Topic “Installing Wordpress”) so I fired up the plugin and am now able to configure what appears in it.
Whats just a little bit cooler is that you can write mini plugins for the plugin that allow you to include different feeds. So I wrote two, one for Planet Redbrick and one for Planet Irish Gaming.
Read More…
Started playing around with Planet which is this RSS feed aggregator to HTML thingy.
I set up Irish Gaming Planet as a test and people seem to like it. Now if I can only get other gaming sites to have real feeds…
And while I was doing that, colmmacc has set up a Redbrick Planet. I’m helping out too.
I kinda like it a kalediscope look at the blabbering minds and egos of Redbrick.
I’m going to be getting rid of the redbrick ‘occult’ wiki that I’ve been running.
It’s been for 16 months but there is absolutly no content besides my own and it was serving no function for me.
But, it still had some links I’d like to preserve so I’ve created a mirror of it which you are free to download.
Redbrick Occult Wiki June 2005
Also the Redbrick Wiki is now no longer hosted on my webspace. It’s got it’s own spanking new space, dedicated entirely to itself!