Tag: web

Wrote a quick function today also to verify that the syntax of an email address is valid, using regular expressions.

^([a-zA-Z0-9_\.\-])+\@(([a-zA-Z0-9\-])+\.)+([a-zA-Z0-9]{2,4})+$

This will match a userid containing letters, numbers, underscores, dots and hyphens, followed by an at sign, then a domain name containing letters, numbers, hyphens and dots, followed by a suffix of 2-to-4 characters.

Using this regex, I can ensure that the user has entered a potentially valid email address before attempting to send out a confirmation email.

Well after a months-long hiatus from doing anything even remotely related to Blosxonomy, I finally got around to implementing a simple user-confirmation system for the comments system.

Now, when you post comments to an entry, your email is verified against a list of authorized emails. If your email isn't in my list, a verification email is automatically generated and sent to you, containing a link. All you need to do is click the link to confirm your email, and voiala, your comment appears, and you're free to comment as much as you like.

Hopefully this simple step will significantly reduce the amount of comment spam I recieve on this site.

In other sad news, a simple typo in a bash script resulted in the accidental deletion of all comments in my database. *Oops*. Guess I should have made a backup.

So I ran across Google Apps for Your Domain today...

Google Apps for Your Domain lets you offer private-labeled email, instant messaging and calendar accounts to all of your users, so they can share ideas and work more effectively. These services are all unified by the start page, a unique, dynamic page where your users can preview their inboxes and calendars, browse content and links that you choose, search the web, and further customize the page to their liking. You can also design and publish web pages for your domain.

It's all free* and everything is hosted by Google. No hardware or software required.

I signed up yesterday for email and calendar on my domain just to see how it all works, and it honestly couldn't be simpler. All you do is sign in with your Google account, pick the services you want on your domain, and update the appropriate CNAME and MX records with your DNS provider.

I'm now reachable via email at tim timfanelli com, which I'm able to check by logging into a page on my domain, hosted by Google... and I get all the features, flexibility, and storage space of a standard gmail account. It's pretty sweet.

Available services include mail, calendar, chat and customizable start pages for logging in.

One of my favorite features for the email is domain aliasing... if you own multiple domains, you can alias them together in your Google account which allows you to receive email at multiple domains to a single mailbox.

Definitely worth checking out if you need a free, powerful email solution for your domain.

I checked my Google Analytics data this afternoon to get a feel for what my readers are reading... here's a list of the most popular posts on my site -- interestingly, they were some of my favorites too.

• Getting Started with Struts Shale
• How to Create an ATOM Feed
• Securing EJB Applications with Custom JBoss Login Modules
• Apache Rewrite Rules
• Installing Apache2 and SVN using Fink on OS X

Also ranking pretty highly in my popular content is my JBoss tag. Back in the day when I was earning my Master's at Clarkson, I was posting a lot about JBoss configuration and customization.

So, according to Google, that's the best of Tim Fanelli (dot com)

I noticed this afternoon that my site finally receieved a pagerank by Google. Only a 4 out of possible 10, but after months of downtime immediately preceeded by an almost year-long restructuring effort, 4 ain't too shabby for my rarely updated blog.

After a not-so-brief 42 day down period, Tim Fanelli (dot com) is back up and running! I'd cancelled my internet service at home back in February and just this week got around to setting up Blosxonomy on my RimuHosting server... I'm happy to see though that after two days of uptime, my daily page hits are back where they were, and google is referring sites regularly... it's like I never left!

Blosxonomy.com will be back up and running in a day or two, and development will resume shortly thereafter! I've got a couple things I want to change after having gone through the installation process from scratch after having forgotten how to set it up. It's not as simple as I'd though!

Not a whole lot to report other than that. This is more a post to test that my site's configured properly more than anything.

Congrats to Figgy and Stacy on the engagement! Hopefully now she'll never have to worry about the "you can't go after Figgy" law. We were all concerned for her on that front. Thankfully, there won't be any more victims of the law either.

Struts Shale is a proposal for a next-generation web development framework. I've spent a couple days scouring the internet trying to find a simple getting started guide to build a new Shale application, but there just doesn't seem to be one yet. Shale's website promises that a future milestone release will include a blank template ready for customization, but in the meantime, we're left to reading JavaDoc to figure out how to get going. This tutorial will walk you through building a very simple Hello / GoodBye world application using Shale and JavaServer Faces technology from scratch.

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It's been a while since I've started a new J2EE project from scratch, and a lot has changed since the last time I did. I've been working in the J2EE arena for quite a few years now, but with the exception of jETIA, which I started in 2002, I've only been involved in existing projects. jETIA's build system was Ant, revision control was Subversion, and project management and dependencies were managed by hand.

I learned about Maven about a year ago when I responsibilities at my previous job suddenly included maintenance and development of a large, complicated ant based build system. I had hoped that Maven would be the golden solution to my dependency maintenance nightmares, and complicated Ant scripts integrating our source control mechanisms - however I quickly learned (the hard way) that Maven was not flexible enough to adapt to your project structure; I'd have to make my project structure meet their idea of a good layout. Not that I objected to their layout, but the discombobulated state of the project I was working on took years to screw up so badly; fixing it would only further confuse the developers who held deep understanding of how the project ran.

Which brings us today, with my new Maven book (Maven : A Developer's Notebook) and the need to start a project from scratch. Sadly, the book I bought not 4 weeks ago is officially out of date, as Maven 2 is now the standard release, and my book only briefly mentions that while the concepts are the same in version 2, that it's a complete rewrite of the system. Many commands are the same, but the one thing I wanted to do - create a new project - has changed :-\.

Additionally, I discovered today that my MVC framework of choice, Struts, has drastically changed as well! Struts is now broken into two core projects: Structs Action framework - the "original" struts, so to speak, and Shale, a Java Server Faces based MVC framework being billed as "what Struts would have been if we'd known then what we know now".

How fast things change. I feel like, from a technology standpoint, I'm starting all over again... While initially discouraging for me, this should be exciting for you, because this means that I'll be posting many many how tos on getting started with these exciting new versions of technologies designed to make you life in J2EE easier!

So my question to you, then, is aside from Maven for project management, Struts and/or Shale for a strong MVC framework, and Spring for a solid IoC driven dependency injection mechanism - what should I be reading up on during my "technology review" stages, and what are your opinions on them?

Now that I've migrated my blog to a SQL Database, Blosxonomy had lost some of Blosxom like ease of use, so I decided it was necessary to create a web-based interface to post to my blog. I had originally thought I'd just use my entry-conversion utility and continue to write Blosxom style posts, but quickly decided that was absurd. For those of you keeping track of Blosxonomy, this feature will be included in 0.7.3, which is in the final testing stages now.

In any event, I needed to protect the page that posts to my website from being accessed, and use mod_ssl and mod_rewrite to do it.

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A hate to have resorted to this, but after asking all the ex-cosiites I know, submitting a comment to COSI via the feedback form on the website, and contacting a professor directly - this is my last attempt to get someone to change my RSS URL at the Planet COSI aggregator.

ATTENTION PLANET COSI:

Please change the RSS URL you use for my site (http://www.timfanelli.com) to:

http://www.timfanelli.com/rss

The URL you currently use is deprecated, and is only still in existence because I can't seem to get anyone there to change it. It's going to dissapear soon, and I'd like to stay on the Planet COSI blog.

Thank you. ~Tim

Spent a couple minutes this morning touching up my Blosxonomy flavour and CSS to make this site render in valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional markup!

It's the little things in life that make me happy. It was actually pretty easy to do - my markup was relatively well formed to begin with. I simply had to add the DOCTYPE element:

<!DOCTYPE html
     PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" 
     "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

To my head template, and change a bunch of

<div id="bla">...

to

<div class="bla">...

And update my CSS accordingly (changing hash marks to dots).

Of course the continued validity of my markup requires me to use wellformed XHTML markup in my posts, but I try not to go too crazy with the markup, just simple paragraph tags, links, and the occassional image element - it's kind of hard to mess those up.

Once I do some more sanity checking I'll post my flavour over at Blosxonomy so there'll be an xhtml 1.0 transitional flavour available.

Pete inadvertantly got me thinking about "the fold" the other day. The fold is the point on your site below which users must scroll to see content - and mine was pretty high. This is because I had a lot of whitespace above my banner image, large date headings, and a narrow site width.

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Thanks to the Web Archive, I was able to retrieve a bunch of old posts that I had lost a couple years ago when the server I hosted on at the time crashed. I restored the posts that had interesting content with their original publish dates, and thought I'd post a "Best of '03" to those stories. So here they are, in chronological order:

• Passing J2SE Collections in Remote EJB Method Calls
• Writing Custom JAAS Login Modules
• Securing EJB Applications with custom JBoss Login Modules
• Setting the User Timeout in JBoss
• Loading Arbitrary Classes from Arbitrary Places
• JDBC Metadata and Column Types

I finally got around to touching up my CSS, and timfanelli.com now appears properly under IE. Thankfully the fix wasn't too cludgy... I just had to widen my main div's width a couple pixels to account for IE's invalid padding scheme :-\. Oh well

Well I decided to have my new CSS go live today; I polished it up a little this morning and I think it's good to go. I also added a google search link, and an adsense ad to try and make a few extra pennies :). Also, I added the "gecko" pyblosxom plugin, so if you're not using a gecko based browser, you'll see an extra message saying the site renders best under it, and gives you a link to firefox.

Well thanks to Figgy, I'm back on PlanetCosi after moving to pyBlosxom. Sorry to all you planet cosi readers who saw that my RSS feed had no pubdates :-\. Cheese helped me out with that one and it should all be back to normal again.

Meanwhile, my shiny new car is a little broke :(. The display in the panel went out yesterday, which I *think* may be related to the gas-cap light coming on because the ass at the gas station didn't close my gas cap properly. Guess it's back to the dealer for me :-\.

And oh yeah, I'm sorry I still must insist that current_temp > 0 --> NO JACKET holds true.