HallmarcDotNet

Tue, 19 Jan 2010

Blog Coding Updated

Although I've based the code for this blog on the Blosxom framework, and use the Tiny MCE JavaScript library to handle editing chores, the fundamentals are significantly modified from the original.

Among other things, I've custom-coded the blog to support picture uploads, automagically create thumbnails and link to the full-sized images; added an authentication mechanism; and configured custom blogs for each member of the family. 

Unfortunately, due to a misconfiguration on my part, Tiny MCE was substituting a relative path for the absolute path on each of the image includes and links. This worked just fine, until I added the ability to browse the blog by category or by date. When these features are active, it causes the blog script to generate temporary subdirectories in the URL, and in conjunction with Apache, redirects requests for the category- or calendar-based pages, breaking the images.

When I discovered this problem, I did a little research and determined that I could simply tweak the Tiny MCE configuration to eliminate the issue on all new blog posts. However, this did not fix any existing entries. 

Because Blosxom generates web pages based on the datestamp on the individual files created when a user writes a post, simply running a search-and-replace against all files to change the relative paths to absolute paths would result in all existing blog entries showing up as being new as of the time I executed the change.

Obviously, this is not good.

Further, although I could individually modify the files one at a time to restore their original datestamps, the volume of files involved made that a non-starter. 

To resolve the issue, I have written a Perl script that parses through all of the existing blog entries, corrects the paths, and then saves the file with the original datestamp. This wasn't rocket surgery; but it was a new endeavor for me. On the off-chance that you might encounter a similar problem, I am making this script available under the GPL. Feel free to use it, but be sure to make a backup copy of your data before executing it.