A while back I mentioned that I was going to be updating and overhauling the blogspam.net service. That process is now almost complete. A couple of nights ago I overhauled the website, and today I've finally committed my last (planned) change to the repository for the purposes of migration. I started reworking the code a week or so ago, but as of this evening the code in the repository is the code the server is actually running.

The previous codebase was functional but a little hasty - and was implemented before I switched to per-UID server-hosting - so there was a need to clean things up and make sure permissions and similar niggles were checked.

The new, modular, codebase requires no root access, and will store all state (logs & transient caches) in a clean extensible fashion. The code is also much more flexible making use of Module::Pluggable rather than Class::Pluggable. This allowed me to overhaul the API of the plugins (primarily to add an expire method such that each plugin has a well-defined means to expire any state they may maintain). Module::Pluggable is a great module - allows me to treat plugins as first class objects, which wasn't the case with C::P.

Since all the code behind the service is Perl it is also now available on CPAN in addition to the mercurial repository where it is developed..

I see that the server is getting pretty popular these days, used by the likes of embedders.org, publiclive.com, & etc. It doesn't hurt that ikiwiki, identi.ca, and other people include support in their distributions these days. Me? I mostly use it on debian-administration.org where it does a great job.

ObQuote: What's the name of that thing that if I eat it real fast, it's free? - Whip It.

Tags: blogspam, cpan, perl | 2 comments