I upgraded the software that runs the developer blogs hosted by Gentoo. Hopefully this will bring SPAM to zero (or close to it).

Let me, dsd or beandog know if you have any problems.

In response to the amount of spam the dev blogs have been receiving lately, dsd asked me to setup and test a new version of the b2evolution software (the blog software that powers the dev blogs. This doesn't affect the planet software in any way).

This new version is 1.8-july-9 and it's an alpha release but reported to be relatively stable. It's going to need a good amount of testing once I have it set up before we can release it so I'll be calling for volunteers in the next few days.

This new version has a completely rewritten backend. It has been modularized and it's now very easy to use plug-ins. We are especially interested in this version because http://akismet.com is now compatible. This should drop the amount of spam from a torrent to a trickle. This will keep the manual work that beandog is doing (thanks beandog!) down to almost zero.

The 1.8 alpha is abi/api complete and promises to be upgradeable to the stable release version with no service interruptions necessary (although the initial upgrade will require a small downtime).

Stay tuned!

I know we are all waiting with bated breath for the mysql cluster upgrade for bugs.gentoo.org (I know I am) and the team working on the issue has been working overtime. I've been following the progress on IRC and the infra mailing list and I can assure you that both the Gentoo and the OSU teams have been doing an excellent job setting this up and testing it.

The main OSU person working on this had an excellent opportunity to intern at the mozilla foundation this summer, congrtulations! Unfortunately, this means that we will not be getting our new mysql cluster as soon as we thought. :-(

The good news is that the Gentoo Infra team that is working on this has several back-up plans and is implementing one of them now as an interim solution. Of course, this isn't going to happen overnight but it will happen soon-ish.

This isn't an official status report or anything like that. An issue arose about poor communication from the Infra team so I thought I would just give a little heads up to everyone that the bugzie team *is* hard at work on this issue and is working to overcome a major obstacle.

bugzie team++

disclamier: I'm not part of the bugzie team so take what I say with a grain of salt.

A quick and dirty preview of what this upgrade to xhtml-1.0 strict and the style sheet selector will allow us to do (Change Style at the top right of the content area). It's not finished, I did this in two hours in between cooking dinner so please *please* don't start sending me bug reports about the layout/design/artwork or how it works.

The style sheet selector is javascript in this *preview* but THAT WILL CHANGE. Neysx has already written a function to make this 100% server side so NO java will ever be required.

The menus still need some work and rearranging.

This is an unfinished proof of concept.

http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org

For a more in depth example of this type of site and how it works visit http://csszengarden.com

Well, I was planning on announcing this later on but I guess now is as good a time as any. I posted this to the gentoo-dev mailing list in response to a question concerning the new Gentoo Theme. I thought it best to post it here as well:

The redesign as it was known up until this point is no more. There were things the winner of the contest had to do and he failed to do them (after almost 2 years of trying to get him too). I discussed it with klieber a little and after much thought I have decided that the WWW-Redesign Contest is now officially dead and abandoned.

Instead, I'm now the "Web Coordinator". I proposed this new role to the Infra Leads and met no resistance or objections so I have taken the initiative and created the role. Also, neysx and I together were approached and offered to be the new www node administrators as a team. Of course we both said yes. Official Infra Monkey at last! :D

As Web Coordinator I am responsible for ensuring a consistent look and feel and adherence to standards across all *.gentoo.org sites.

This includes standardizing on an xhtml-1.0 layout with a standard set of css id's and classes so that a single "core" style sheet can be shared across all *.gentoo.org sites with a minimal custom style sheet being imported to take care of the site specific styling. This will make it **so** easy to change the ENTIRE *.gentoo.org web presence layout/design by simply dropping in a new style sheet.

Basically what I'll be doing is letting the individual maintainers of the various sites focus on the back-end functionality of their sites. Leaving the forward facing html/css for me to worry about freeing up their valuable time.

wwwredesign.gentoo.org already has been converted and is going live on www.gentoo.org shortly (we just have a few last minute things to do).

I'm also working on bugday.g.o (with GurliGebis), planet.g.o and torrents.g.o and those 3 should be ready to go by the end of the month. Hopefully upstream for planet and torrents will accept my patches where applicable. Even if they don't these web-apps are pretty simplistic and keeping a customized version up-to-date will be no problem.

I'll be working with tomk on forums.g.o and we already have a plan in the works. The forum has already been so heavily modified that it is almost not even recognizable as a phpbb anymore. tomk says we can pretty much do what we want to it (within reason) without having to worry about upstream accepting our modifications.

bugs.g.o will be done with jforman. bugs.g.o is a touchy one, it's one of our most used resources so it will have to be done very slowly, very carefully and I'll have to get all the relevant patches accepted upstream. I doubt jforman wants to stray from the official upstream release very much, I haven't talked to him about this yet though so I'm not sure. bugs may end up getting a new header/footer and nothing else. We'll see how it goes.

packages.g.o is a custom web-app written and maintained by marduk who is currently busy in real life. I'm putting this one on the bottom of the list until he gets more free time. I *could* just style the existing site without him but he is working on packages-2.0 and it will add a lot of needed functionality. I'd rather wait and do this the right way instead of wasting time styling a site that he is going to replace anyway.

Neysx and I also have a plan to make the stylesheet user selectable so we can offer multiple themes. He already has a semi-working prototype at gentoo.neysx.org (it doesn't work in IE yet). I'll extend that concept to all the other websites. This fits perfectly with the idea of theming the websites to match the liveCD's. We can offer that theme as the default but still let people choose the "classic" style or any other styles we may offer.

Realistically speaking I can have all of this done by the 2007.0 release (maybe not bugs - depends on how much jforman is willing to stray from the official bugzilla release). If everyone wants to shoot for 2006.1 for this new theme I will at least have 4 sites complete and ready for the new theme. The others can be themed as I get them upgraded.

I know the redesign was a great big PITA. I faced many obstacles in getting it put up live (the specifics are irrelevant). Now that I am a full fledged Infra member with some actual authority and the support of the rest of the Infra team (teaming up with neysx is also making it MUCH easier) I can actually get (and AM getting) things accomplished.

Interesting to see how many people are downloading using a windows OS.

http://dev.gentoo.org/~curtis119/x86-livecd-2006.0.html

http://dev.gentoo.org/~curtis119/x86-installcd-2006.0.html

Here's stats for the server upload:

http://dev.gentoo.org/~curtis119/torrent-client-upload-feb_2-10amEST-330pmEST.txt

I volunteered to set up a new Torrent Tracker for the project. jforman and ramereth were both great to work with. I was a little nervous when we went live but everything went smooth.

The server is going strong with 350+G transferred and 900+ connected users as of right now (5am EST).

Thanks to everyone who participated in this release. :-)

In fact, if you use the validator and let it auto detect the doctype it correctly detects xhtml-1.1 and validates the page using that specification (ignore the errors, I'm still workin' on it). Browsers will also detect it, including IE, and use the correct specs to render the page. They also render the page in Standards Compliance Mode, including IE.

Trust me on this, I researched it *extensively* before making the jump to xhtml-1.1, I didn't just blindly decide to change. I read the entire xhmtl-1.1 specification. I didn't just skim it or skip any parts I read the entire thing. I read the XSLT-1.0 specification to make sure I was doing it right in the xsl. I also read TONS of threads from all over the world discussing this, including from IE support sites, apache, mozilla, w3c and web designer sites.

MS officially suggests using text/html in the HTTP header when serving xhtml-1.1 documents to IE. Mozilla, Opera, Firefox, Konqueror can all correctly use application/xml+xhtml and officially suggest that is what you send in the HTTP header but **ALL** of them are also backwards compatible with text/html.

None of the text browsers, as far as I know, can use application/xml+xhtml yet but, just like IE, they can correctly render an xhtml-1.1 page validly and in Standards Compliance Mode with text/html in the HTTP header.

So, to sum it up:

The site is validly serving XHTML-1.1 (except for the errors I haven't fixed yet) that is recognized by all browsers and correctly rendered. The server doesn't have to send application/xml+xhtml in the HTTP header in order for it to be valid, it can send text/html too.