Month: October 2004

Interactive Blogging

And now, ladies and gentlemen, my blog is interactive… well sort of.You can add your comments to my personal rants and read the comments other people added. The system is quite primitive, but it seems to work and costed me some effort, so use it! 🙂
How does it work? Quite simply, you click on the link below, named “read/add comments” and a page with my entry followed by all the comments will appear. At the bottom of this page you’ll find a form you can use to add your comment.
In the blog page only the last 10 entries are displayed, while the previous ones are located in the archive.
I’m going to add some explanation to the read/add comment page, for now I think it is important you know that:

  1. email and user are optional.
  2. there is a cookie used to mantain the session. If you don’t accept the cookie the blog keeps working, but will be unable to remember your data.
  3. I won’t use your personal details for any other purpouse than displaying them on the blog comment pages.
  4. How your personal data are protected?
    • They are stored in files not accessible in any way other than browsing the blog.
    • The HTML produced doesn’t contain any readable mail address (this is achieved through some clever javascript usage).
  5. There is no preview available. If you click on ‘Submit’ button, your comment will be added. That’s it. If you want to remove a comment you have to contact me.
  6. I’ll check every comment and I’ll remove what I feel not fair or abusing of this simple tool. Anyway there is no filtering, you write and it’s on line. It can just be removed later.
  7. The ‘Clear’ button doesn’t do anything 🙂

If you are very concerned about privacy, mail abuse and the like don’t enter your email.
I feel everything is safe enough for me, but obviously I cannot grant anything to anyone.
There are several improvements for this blog system and I like to hear from you your opinions and suggestions. I would be very happy of hearing about bugs. I put in place some sanitization code I feel it’s enough, in case you should break into the system, please don’t wreak havoc, but inform me ASAP.
That’s all for now, enjoy!

Watch the newsstand

It is a long time I don’t write anything here. Not because I haven’t anything to say (I would have to tell you my experiences with wireless networking on linux, a new trick I discovered about shell programming, the digital camera I bought… ok you’ve got the picture ;-), but because I’m spending most of my free time on writing a blog system in PHP. You may wonder why I’m doing this, when there are plenty of readily availabe blogs… ok, this is yet another story. What I’d like to tell you now is that you’ll find an article written by me in the October ’04 issue of the italian magazine Computer Programming. The article is about assignment operator in C++ and exceptions. Obviously it is written in Italian and I’m not sure if I can translate it and put it on my site with a public access (I fear not).