/blog

Happy Friday!

Almost made it through the first work-week of 2021 and what a week it's been. Work itself has been reasonably quiet as people are either still on leave or just feeling their way back in after the holiday period but the big wide world continues to be that crazy mess we've seen so much of in the last 12 months or so.

On a personal note this has been an incredibly productive week as far as the blog is concerned. To have gone from just starting to take it seriously again on the 3rd, when all I had was a way of displaying existing posts, to a fully working engine and to actually go live in just three days is quite an accomplishment. Not to blow my own trumpet or anything.

A lot of the hard work was already done with building the layer on top of WordPress, I mainly just had to translate it to a standalone environment. I deliberately wanted it to look the same and so based the theme on my custom WordPress theme, this allowed me to create the dark mode CSS in just a few minutes with copy/paste and a few changes and additions.

I've gone one step further on the new blog: I've added the ability to delete comments inline just in case the honeypots aren't effective. There is no admin page so I want it is as quick and easy as possible to remove unwanted, abusive, offensive or spam comments. I suppose, in a way, the blog itself is the admin page seeing as I can edit or delete anything.

The blackbirds have become bullies, they have started chasing off the robins if they both want to feed at the same time. The blackbirds feed off the ground as they are too large for the feeder. One of the robins likes to use the feeder but the other prefers the ground so we have a bit of a fight over territory.

I've updated my post and comment submissions to use prepared statements for security. If you can read this it has worked.

Update: looks good!

I was thinking more about comments and what to do if spam/abuse becomes a problem and the honeypots don't work. I don't want to but I could switch to a moderation model where an additional "approved" column is added to the comments table. Viewing the page as normal would filter for those where approved=true but when logged in I could see all comments with an option to manually approve them. It will be simple to implement but I'd prefer not to have to.

It seems the done thing to have a name for your blogging system so I need to think of something witty and snappy. I'm useless at naming things so it could end up along the lines of 'SWAIN' - System Without An Interesting Name (bonus points if you know the reference.)