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As promised a new blogspam.net

18 August 2010 21:50

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.

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Comments on this entry

icon Adam at 23:26 on 19 August 2010

Cool! The LUG web site could do with something like this. It has been plagued with spam recently. I think we tried an earlier version of your blogspam service on the hacked usemod version of our wiki, but now we are using MoinMoin we don't have this kind of service any more.

The local stop list has helped, but still the site does suffer more than the previous Usemod site did.

http://www.hantslug.org.uk/

The Perl is Alive site (based on YAWNS) has also been plagued by comment spam and could do with this too.

icon Steve Kemp at 18:00 on 22 August 2010

It's not ideally suited for wikis, due to the markup-changes that they often suit, but with a little tweaking it does seem to work a lot of the time.

The Perl Is Alive site could use the filtering method - I'll drop Denny a mail in the next few days to poke him.