Personal Musings for Public Consumption - Blog

Fixing up WordPress to work behind nginx

nospam@example.com (Sean Chittenden) — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 21:06:41 -0800

WordPress looks nice, but is a rats nest of code under the hood. If you configure nginx* to proxy back to Apache*, you may find yourself with a nifty pile of never ending 301 redirects. I've solved this before, but had long since forgotten. Below I've got my recipe for fixing.
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Privacy Levels, content updates, and other CMS updates.

nospam@example.com (Sean Chittenden) — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 08:40:00 -0800

I just threw in a few snippets of code to handle the useful "updated" feature. If I post a blurb of content, and revise the post, I do want to bump the content to the front of the line as a new post, but don't want to move the date that the news blurb was published. Also added a privacy level so that I can write crap and shield it from the world's virgin eyes. Paragraphs that I deem required content for the front page are also now included when generating the front page index, which is important so that I can remove the two <br/> tags between the content of my Squirrel post and the video of the catapult, while still ensuring that the video makes it onto the front page. Lastly, I've also added the ability to pre-write a story and not have it publish until such time as the news is ready to break. Hardly original features, but consider that all of this has been done without aid of a turing complete programming language (sh may arguably be turing complete, but I don't want to lump it into that category) and in probably 4hrs of work. Keen. I can now collect more Squirrel Catapult related content, write up some snarky bit of dribble that I find amusing, and then suddenly reveal its existence to the world without lifting a finger. Super keenness has been achieved.

I may take this collection of scripts and crap and make it open source. I think I want to add content filtering before I release this into the world, however. Wouldn't it be nice to have foo(N) references automatically link to a man page wiki style, and for the seven dirty words to go from shit to sh#%? Hrm... fuck it, content filtering will be done by sed. You script kiddy n00bs need to get a grip on reality and do something useful with your fingers. Triple holy crap! All of this done and it's not even 9am (ie, I haven't finished my coffee yet). Win.

Updated 2007-11-20T15:50:00-08:00: Well shit, wouldn't you know it. Neither OS-X nor my hosting provider have current versions of xmllint or xsltproc. `sudo port install libxml2` and `./configure --prefix=$HOME/local/xml` to the rescue (after cleansing libtool(1)/bash(1) unholiness), but damn it what a pain in the ass. Without dyn:map(), I'm not sure XSL would be usable: it certainly makes sorting dates harder (read: only way to sort dates without using a recursive template function).

Updated 2007-11-21T13:40:00-08:00: Crap. My change to ISO datetimes broke my future proofing bits. I posted a video for later this afternoon and found that I had all kinds of busted logic because of that. Fix the build system and all previous dependencies on dates. Kinda gnarly, but now counts are correct in not including future or hidden posts. exslt standards committee, an XSLT date comparison operator would be really nice. Thanks. In the mean time, cron has been activated.

Wrote a new CMS today and am going to hell for this one...

nospam@example.com (Sean Chittenden) — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 18:30:00 -0800

Tools used are limited to xmllint*, xsltproc*, make(1), and sh(1). make(1) calls xsltproc*, which generates a temp shell script which turns around and generates the various pages of content using xsltproc* with different sets of stylesheets. Grotesque? Yup. Clean? Very, actually. I dare say, elegant even.

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Site Relaunched!

nospam@example.com (Sean Chittenden) — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 22:00:00 -0800

About time! It's high time I put this bastard back up and started making use of it again! Kinda feels grotesque to have to fuck around with HTML, CSS, and web programming, but if I remember this programming thing correctly, I may be able to free myself from spending time in the weeds...

Folks can drop me an email at sean@chittenden.org with requests for various bits that are now missing, I'll restore them as appropriate.