Month: September 2004

I tend to find when I’ve had a tough day at work, diverting my energy to developing this site and Jeens is quite calming. Programming, believe it or not is not just a job for me, but a way to calm down and destress myself at the end of the day.

As you can see, the look and feel is consistent even on individual blog entries now, and you can now make comments. I don’t think anyone is really even reading this right now, but hey, if you are, let me know! I also converted Simon Cozen’s Calendar plugin he wrote for Template Toolkit to work in HTML::Mason. I am also no longer controlling the blog through apache as shown below (although that is still possible with the updates I’ve made). I have created a blog.html Mason component which calls an instance of bryar and passes it on to another component that reads the url, and presents the blog accordingly. One thing I would like to add down the road is a RewriteHandler module in Perl that converts ? and &’s to /’s and other search-engine friendly arguments. This way search engines are more likely to view the website as static rather than dynamic.

I think my next focus however is going to be on the Photo section. I’ve changed the header above – all photos are under the “ARTIST” link above which I will hope to keep a blog of my photography, artwork, and other peoples’ artwork that I appreciate. I also added two other “forbidden subjects” – politics and religion. Yes, I’m a Mormon, and proud of it. I strongly believe my religion to be true and am happy to talk about it. I plan to voice my faith and findings and thoughts on my religion there.

Also, I am a politician. No, I don’t hold any political office or anything but I love to get involved and voice my opinions on politics. Who knows – maybe someday I’ll even run for office if people will let me. I tend to side with the so-called “conservative” people in my political beliefs, but don’t let that get you down. I often cross the line on certain issues such as Murder and many technological issues. I am easy to talk with on both sides of the line because I really enjoy learning the facts and basing my own political beliefs based on those facts. Teach me!

Well, Bryar now allows you to actually click on individual articles using the Bryar/Frontend/Mod_Perl.pm module, but for some reason I can’t get the text after /blog to be counted in path_info. I inserted a /x/ after /blog now so path_info will recognize the article id’s after that. I’m not sure why that doesn’t work.

Here’s a sample httpd.conf entry for Mod_Perl 2:

   
     PerlSetVar BryarDataDir /path/to/data/dir
     PerlSetVar Renderer Mason
     SetHandler perl-script
     PerlResponseHandler Bryar::Frontend::Mod_perl
   

Next step: get my main HTML::Mason look and feel templates to render the
/blog articles

Well, I’m finally moving to where I want to go with jeens (or should I call it “jeans”?), my family-based, open source CMS based on HTML::Mason and Mod_Perl. This is just one of multiple parts to this project. This is a sample of my individual page, where each family member will be able to create their own pages. Soon I will be working on the sub family and extended family pages. This will eventually become a “myfamily.com” on steroids, all free and open source for you to have the “geek” in your family install and run for your own family!

The part you are reading right now is thanks to the work of Simon Cozen’s Bryar, an object-oriented approach to the well known blosxom software. I have added an HTML::Mason renderer and also modified the set of modules to work in both Mod_Perl 1.x and Mod_Perl 2.x (the former only worked on versions 1.x). I will post source here shortly.

This site and blog and all parts of it are a work in progress, and when I feel it is something worth using I will post the code for all to use. All code used to generate the parts of this site that you can see is developed under the GPL – please send me a request if you like what you see and would like to help!

Why am I calling this project “jeens” – well, I wanted a variation of “genes”, which was too unoriginal, so I figured I may as well keep it “in the family” and name it partially after part of my wife’s name. Let me know if you think this is stupid or have better name ideas.