Florent Thoumie

Some days ago, I’ve installed WordPress MU on erwin’s box, so that FreeBSD committers not willing to install one and maintain it could write some lines about their work on FreeBSD or FreeBSD related topics. While there wasn’t too many people asking for such a service at the time (I think only 2 or 3 committers explicitly said to me they were interested), I’ve been quite delighted to see that 3 days after the service opened, more than 20 committers already signed up. While people seem to enjoy blogging, the installed version is a snapshot made after large changes have been committed to the MU svn repository. Unfortunately this commit broke a lot of things (but not basics, so it’s still ok to post entries and comments), so I’ll wait to have a stable WordPress MU installation to ask for blogs.freebsd.org. I think FreeBSD blogs are quite successful. I wanted people to write about FreeBSD and they just did it. Thanks to everybody

When I started the whole FreeBSD planet thingie (one year ago), only a few people knew about it. Back in september 2005 I asked core@ to make the thing a bit more official by assigning a CNAME under the freebsd.org domain. At that time, there has been a post by one of our bloggers (who wasn’t aware of the whole planet thing) which core@ judged inappropriate (everybody agreed on this). So the planet idea was postponed, and only to be revived one month ago. I then created a FreeBSD-only planet and complete one. Recent discussions showed that the problem was resolved, so it should be a matter of time before the CNAME RR is created.

I recently made some changes to the planet template and CSS, so it looks like a bit more a freebsd.org website (well, it’s red). I’ve helped simon@ to upgrade the FreeBSD Wiki to a recent version of moinmoin. I’ve also worked on a new theme for moinmoin (that you can see here), because it really sucks to use the default one.

Ok, it seems I could find an all-in-one solution to avoid spam getting into my blog. I was wrong, there’s one. It’s called SpamKarma.

I’ve been using it for some days now, and no spam showed up, comment or trackback. I received a digest with all rejected comments, just to make sure there are no false positives.

The plugin is highly configurable and works with WordPress MU, which is quite cool

I hope I won’t have to try another plugin.

I’ve been working on two scripts to handle md(4) devices (creation, mount, populating) lately.

There have been two rc.d scripts (ramdisk and ramdisk-own) for quite some time but it was limited to swap and malloc backed devices. So, these new scripts allow to create vnode backed md(4) devices at startup. I’ve also included support for mkuzip compressed files (as requested by anders).

It has been committed to HEAD some days ago. I haven’t planned MFC yet, but if I get enough successful reports and requests, I might commit it to RELENG_6 before 6.2R is released.

Ok, so it seems everything worked fine with the first plugin I installed some weeks ago and suddenly I started getting approximatively 10 spams a day.

I was about to set a CAPTCHA plugin when I noticed they weren’t real comments, but trackbacks instead, so I went to wp-plugins.net and found a plugin to prevent trackback-spam. So it’s enabled, we’ll see if it works.

Since I had some time to work on Planet FreeBSD lately, I decided to rewrite part of the template and the CSS. The result still is in beta, see Planet FreeBSD .

I’ve recontacted core@ about the DNS CNAME and we’re trying to find an agreement. It’s just a matter of time before planet.freebsd.org shows up.