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Here’s how I configured my website to use Blosxom as its
CMS (content management system - a fancy term for the way
a site is organized). My requirements were:
-
The root URL (www.kcaran.com) had
to point to blosxom.cgi.
-
The URL’s to blog entries should look like static links (e.g.,
http://www.kcaran.com/entries/technology/linux/debian_upgrade_woes.html
-
Files and directories outside of Blosxom should be accessible as before.
My Fantasy Football pages should still reside at
http://www.kcaran.com/footb/.
And I should be able to create new files and directories without changing
the web server configuration.
Once you have Blosxom configured and working the way you want, place
it in a directory named blosxom under your root web directory.
For me, that would be /var/www/caran/blosxom.
[caran@mlougee caran]$ pwd
/var/www/caran
[caran@mlougee caran]$ ll blosxom/
total 60
drwxrwsr-x 9 caran www-data 4096 Oct 7 14:17 ./
drwxrwsr-x 25 caran www-data 4096 Oct 7 14:27 ../
-rw-rw-r-- 1 caran www-data 14 Sep 29 08:57 .cvsignore
drwxrwsr-x 2 caran www-data 4096 Oct 7 14:54 CVS/
-rwxrwxr-x 1 caran www-data 16784 Oct 7 14:17 blosxom.cgi*
drwxrwsr-x 3 caran www-data 4096 Oct 5 12:29 css/
drwxrwsr-x 4 caran www-data 4096 Oct 7 13:41 entries/
-rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data 0 Oct 7 14:16 error_log.txt
drwxrwxr-x 3 caran www-data 4096 Oct 7 14:54 feedback/
drwxrwsr-x 3 caran www-data 4096 Oct 7 14:23 flavours/
drwxrwsr-x 3 caran www-data 4096 Oct 4 14:34 images/
drwxrwsr-x 4 caran www-data 4096 Oct 5 12:30 plugins/
Last Updated: Thu, 17 Nov 2005
Managing and tracking changes made to code, otherwise known as version
control, is vital to any software project, large or small. CVS,
the Concurrent Versions System, is one change management application.
This is a summary of how to use CVS in an environment with servers running
both Unix and Microsoft Windows operating systems.
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Last Updated: Wed, 05 Oct 2005
Making your Javascript code work on both IE and Firefox isn’t hard.
Here are a few modifications to IE-only code to make it work on
Firefox:
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Last Updated: Thu, 17 Nov 2005
Some may consider me a masochist, but Perl is my language-of-choice for
web applications, even when I am “forced” to use Microsoft’s Internet
Information Services, otherwise known as IIS, for my web server.
As usual, the Microsoft server has little quirks that need to be
tamed in order to write cross-platform code. Here are some tips for
making your perfectly good Perl code run under IIS:
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Last Updated: Mon, 26 Sep 2005
Splitting a Perl application into seperate files can be trickier than
doing it in other languages, like C or C++, but it is still an
important part of producing maintainable code.
Creating the Package
A Perl module is a collection of code stored in a single file.
By definition, all variables and function names in the module are
stored in a package with the same name as the file.
For example, a module named Cgiutils would be stored in the file
Cgiutils.pm. Any functions or variables in the module belongs
to the Cgiutils package namespace. The beginning of the file
should look like this:
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Last Updated: Mon, 26 Sep 2005
Here are some random Perl things I always need to look up:
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Last Updated: Mon, 26 Sep 2005
I’ve been having some trouble with the way Microsoft SQL Server pads
strings stored in its tables with spaces. Generally, I would assume
that columns of type ‘CHAR’ would be a fixed length (and therefore padded),
while columns of type ‘VARCHAR’ would be variable length. But I would be
wrong.
The default behavior for SQL Server 7.0 and Server 2000 is that
CHAR’s and VARCHAR’s are padded to their maximum lengths. To make the
VARCHAR columns unpadded, the ‘ansi_padding’ property needs to be set
to ‘off’. Unfortunately, you must do this every time you open a session
with the database server. There isn’t a way to force ANSI padding off
as the default.
See more ...
Last Updated: Mon, 26 Sep 2005
We run two Debian Linux servers at work: a back-up web server and a
sandbox for random Linux development. Recently, I decided to do an
apt-get upgrade on the servers to update their software packages
to the latest versions.
I figured it would be simple. We were already running the unstable branch.
And it hadn’t been that long since I last attempted an upgrade. So, as
root, I issued the following commands:
# apt-get update
# apt-get dist-upgrade
Uh-oh! I kept getting the following error:
Setting up libc6 (2.3.5-3) ...
mv: error while loading shared libraries: libacl.so.1: cannot enable
executable stack as shared object requires: Error 14
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Last Updated: Thu, 17 Nov 2005
At work, we use Microsoft SQL Server and IBM AS400 databases. Here’s
how I set our Linux boxes to allow them to connect to the databases
through ODBC. There are seperate instructions for the
Debian and RedHat distributions.
ODBC connections require several layers of software to work. The
bottom layer consists of the individual ODBC drivers for each
database system. Our top layer is the DBI/DBD interface for Perl.
In between these layers is the ODBC driver manager, which keeps
track of the DSN’s and their corresponding ODBC drivers.
Packages and Software to Install
Debian Version (“unstable” distribution)
We use unixODBC as our ODBC driver manager. First, install unixODBC:
NOTE: Perl’s DBD::ODBC module requires the developer’s version
of unixODBC.
# apt-get install unixodbc-dev
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Last Updated: Thu, 17 Nov 2005
For those of you lucky enough to use Microsoft Outlook for
email, here’s how to send a message in HTML format:
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Last Updated: Mon, 26 Sep 2005
