PatchLog
XML Sitemaps for Pligg
Update: There is be a new version of this module. Click here to get it.
I created a module that generates XML Sitemaps for Pligg ( the well known open source cms used for creating sites similar to digg.com ).
The module generates a sitemap index and sitemaps with all the stories in the database dynamically so nothing is stored on disk and you don't have to set a cron job to generate it.
The sitemaps are updated automatically when a new story is submitted. Because of the structure of the sitemap index and because it contains "lastmod" info, the search engines should only download the latest entries in the index so you shouldn't worry about the module putting too much load on your system.
There is also a "ping" function that will announce google, yahoo and ask.com every time a new story is submitted so that they know they have to download the sitemap. The ping function required a little patching to pligg source code to add some hooks ( only if you use 9.6, 9.7 should already have those hooks ). Here is the diff file in case you use pligg 0.9.6 : pligg submit hooks diff
The module was only tested on pligg 0.9.6, I haven't upgraded to 0.9.7 yet, so if you try this on 0.9.7 let me know how it works, any feedback is appreciated.
Download:
You can download Xml_Sitemaps module from here: xml_sitemaps-0.1.tar.gz and in case you want to verify it here is the md5 sum and the sha256 sum
the code is released under the same license as pligg, so feel free to use it, modify and share.
Installation:
This is pretty straight forward, you have to install this like any other pligg module, just put the .tar.gz file in the modules, un-archive it then go into pligg admin and activate it. If you use pligg 0.9.6 and you want to be able to ping the search engines don't forget to apply the submit hooks patch .
Configuration:
After installation you should be able to access the sitemap index like this : http://yourdomain.com/module.php?module=xml_sitemaps_show_sitemap or if you want the sitemap to look friendly ( btw ask.com will only accept a friendly sitemap ending in .xml ) , you just have to go into Admin->Configuration->XmlSitemaps and enable "Sitemap Friendly URL", and if you do that then you have to put the following lines in your .htaccess somewhere before the line "##### URL Method 2 ("Clean" URLs) Begin #####" :
RewriteRule ^sitemapindex.xml module.php?module=xml_sitemaps_show_sitemap [L] RewriteRule ^sitemap-([a-zA-Z0-9]+).xml module.php?module=xml_sitemaps_show_sitemap&i=$1 [L]
Here is how the index looks on a site with sitemap friendly urls enabled: http://sapa.ro/sitemapindex.xml
There are other configuration options in there, you can set the maximum number of stories to put in a sitemap, and you can chose whether to ping any of the three search engines supported. You can also set your yahoo.com key in there if you want to ping yahoo.
That's it! Happy Sitemapping! and as always ... let me know how it works in the comments.
No browser supporting socks5 authentication?
If you're trying to use a socks server with Internet Explorer , Firefox, Opera or Safari everything will work just fine, except for authentication.
From my point of view this is a big problem. Who in the world would leave such a proxy server unprotected? Yeah of course you can always limit access to a proxy server based on ip address, but in some cases ( see NAT ) this is just not going to work.
Internet explorer supports only the socks4 protocol which doesn't even support full password authentication ( only username and it defaults to the current logged in username ) .
Firefox supports socks5 but no authentication mechanism so supporting socks5 is pretty much useless. I think I saw some ticket in bugzilla about this but no one managed to commit a fix yet.
Opera doesn't even support socks protocol but I thought I should mention all major browsers 
Safari supports SOCKS5 and even allows you to set a username and password to access the SOCKS server but it does not use them.
I tried Konqueror, but I was unable to specify the Socks server, I guess this is because it was not compiled with a socks library. Has anyone had any success with Konqueror and Socks ?
css class names in IE 6
I just realized today that IE 6 class names must not start with something else other then [a-zA-Z]. So don't you dare name your classes like _class1 cause it will not work in IE6.
It works well in Firefox 2.0, IE7, opera and safari and that will just make it harder when you'll try to discover the problem.
I know this seems like a lame mistake and something any designer should know, but well I'm not really a designer and some things you never know unless they hit you.
TLS for HTTP
On my previous post about wildcard ssl I was complaining that you have to use a different ip for each domain that needs ssl/https and I wondered why there is no TLS feature like there is in SMTPS where you have STARTTLS. Well it seems I was wrong. There is such a feature, actually there are two different features one is described in RFC2817 and the other in RFC3546. Rfc 2817 specifies how a plain text connection can be "upgraded" to a secured connection over SSL:
This allows unsecured and secured HTTP traffic to share the same well known port (in this case, http: at 80 rather than https: at 443). It also enables "virtual hosting", so a single HTTP + TLS server can disambiguate traffic intended for several hostnames at a single IP address
RFC 3546 various extensions to TLS and one of them is an extension for server name indication . This extension will allow a client to tell the server which domain is contacting.
That's just great, but there's one problem. Not only that few web server software implement any of the two rfcs but also few web browsers support them.
Apache implements rfc 2817 in mod_ssl since version 2.1 and mod_gnutls implements the server name indication extension in TLS described in rfc 3546.
It seems that IE7 has support for RFC 3546 and firefox may have support for rfc 2817.
apache and wildcard ssl
Today I had a client that wanted me to install a wildcard certificate on his new server. A small job, few minutes I said. Only that it was not really like that. The client had this situation. He had one domain foo.tld and the certificate was for *.foo.tld and a lot of subdomains bar.foo.tld apple.foo.tld and others like that. On each domain there was a different site and the client wanted each domain on to be available over SSL because he had a wildcard certificate for *.foo.com. But the problem was that he only had one ip on that server. From what I read in the apache documentation such thing would be impossible . It turns out it's not impossible if you have a wildcard certificate. The ssl FAQ specified two workarounds, #1 use different ports ( not really an option in most cases if you're thinking about serious web business ), and #2 use different ips for each vhost, this may be expensive, hard to get from some ISP, or hard to manage if you have hundreds of domains. I think there should be a line there saying that if you have a windcard ssl you will not need different ips or ports.
Hello world!
This is my first post. Wordress is great.
I decided to start a blog about programming, *nix and other things related to web and internet.
Why patchlog?
Because I will be posting and commenting patches to various open source software from time to time, or because i will be expressing my opinion about how some open source software should work and maybe provide patched to make it work like that.
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