Infrastructure - 3 – Serendipity

The Serendipity Anti-Spam plugin allows to utilize the blogg.de IP blacklist service to block spam. Their service seems to have ceased existence, or at least is rejecting connections. This can lead to comments to your serendipity blog to be rejected. You can easily disable the blogg.de blacklist service in your Anti-Spam plugin configuration.

Note that this option is by default disabled in Serendipity since blogg.de announced that they are no longer actively maintaining the blacklist. A well fit alternative to this service is the Akismet API, which the spamblock plugin also supports.

Like announced earlier on the serendipity blog, fellow usability expert Joachim Harloff is currently trying to improve the listing of Serendipity Plugins so that they are more accessible to users.

He needs your help to fulfill them. Initially he planned to personally meet with serendipity users, but this proved more complex than initially hoped. Thus he has created a smaller, text-based version of it.

You can download the file at http://www.softuse.com/serendipity_sorting.zip. It contains detailed instructions. You can also feel free to personally contact Joachim about any questions you have.

Joachim estimates this questionnaire to take you about 1,5 hours of your time. You could greatly help to improve the serendipity usability, so please participate! Joachim wants to evaluate your responses starting on September the 8th.

For the time being, the Netmirror.org servers currently do not update anymore, they seem to be having a problem. We have contacted the maintainers last week and hope to get feedback soon.

Until then, download of some and new plugins via Spartacus through this mirror will not work, and you will need to configure the Spartacus plugin to use the SourceForge.Net mirror servers.

Once the problem is resolved, we will give you a status update here.

UPDATE: Netmirror.org works again, thanks to their technicians :-)

This month's german PHP magazine features an article introducing Serendipity and its capabilities, as well as some looks into thecode- written by yours truly, Garvin Hicking. The article is titled "Blogging mit Biss"

The article was written with newbies to Serendipity in mind, but also targetted at eager developers who might want to contribute to Serendipity. When the next PHP magazine issue comes out, we'll see to publishing the article on s9y.org.

If you've read the article and want to share your opinion, feel free to comment here.:-)

The nice folks of AOE media GmbH offered to sponsor the s9y project with another dedicated server, which arrived today. I spent the day installing the base system, setting up mysql replication through a vpn between the two servers, and stuff like that. So for those of you who noticed a downtime today, it was a planned one (and also un-announced ;-), that I used to copy a snapshot of the s9y.org and supersized.org databases over to the new server. I hope it didn't cause too much trouble for you, but this made future work/load-distribution over the servers a lot easier. All the s9y.org-webserver-responsiveness-jazz of the last months should ease up a little over the next few months. Finally ;)

The Spartacus services, which was not updating for some time, should now be working again properly. If you still have no access to updated plugins, please let me know.