i summon one kim

I’ve released DoFollow 2.0 to go with WordPress 1.5.1. The functionality is the same as before, and the plugin can be used with (an unpatched) 1.5 as well.

The patch I had proposed to core WordPress functionality is gone: the developers prefer to keep the current nofollow implementation as is. If you had previously applied the patch, you can download a copy from Mosquito issue #1087 and reverse it (e.g. using patch -p -R).

I wanted to make this change to DoFollow, as it removes a chunk of code that was digging in some internal structures of WordPress that don’t have an exposed and documented API. Now it is much less likely that changes to DoFollow would be required for maintaining compatibility with future WordPress releases.

Antoine Reilles submitted a package for the Little Brother’s Database (lbdb) in PR pkg/29164. I’ve had lbdb in my reminders for quite some time, but never got around to packaging it. I tweaked Antoine’s package a bit, and now I have committed it to pkgsrc as databases/lbdb. Thanks, Antoine!

The Little Brother’s Database provides a lookup interface for mail addresses for several data sources. It can retrieve data from its own database, Emacs bbdb, abook, LDAP and even MacOS X addressbooks, and provide the results to external programs such as the Mutt mail reader.

I announced tcsh 6.14 today. The major “new feature” for me in this release is working UTF-8 support. Anyone using multibyte character sets should be much happier now. It has been great having a number of people work on the code — there are over 70 fixes in this release.

I have been practising release engineering for tcsh by cutting the last 3 developer test versions. I have automated the release procedure a bit more to minimize the chance for errors from having to type in detailed commands repeatedly. Let’s see if I can push out another release a bit closer to my desired goal of every 6 months.

I have also installed an issue tracker to make it easier to produce change logs and make sure that issues are not falling through the cracks. I hope it will also provide a searchable long-term memory on past decisions on what will get included in tcsh and when.

Naturally right after announcing the release I updated the pgksrc package for tcsh, so you can install the package right now by updating your pkgsrc tree.

If you are running a recent nightly or svn checkout, you’ll probably need to upgrade to DoFollow 1.3.

The patch detection stopped working due to a change in the wp_filters data structure. I probably should not be looking inside such stuff, but there is no interface to check if a filter has been enabled. I don’t have any other clever way to see if the speedup patch has been applied. (And I don’t want to give up hope yet on the patch being committed to svn one day…)

I just deployed DoFollow on a vanilla WordPress 1.5 installation, and found out that there was a bug in the nofollow tag removal logic used with an unpatched version of the code. If the timeout was set to zero for immediate tag removal, it wouldn’t work. I’ve fixed it, so you should all upgrade to DoFollow 1.2 now.

Another WordPress plugin: Finnish Quotes

The quote marks used in Finnish differ from those used in English. The reverse curly quotes are not used at the beginning of the quotation, instead the same quotation mark is used for both the beginning and the end. This plugin will insert an additional filter after all the default wptexturize() filters to replace the reverse curly quote marks with the forward one.

Download: finquote.php