I got Escargot‘s current development server working on my current machine with Windows Live Messenger 2009 support, and it’s looking very exciting so far.

I haven’t gotten it to work under a Windows XP guest, due to this error:

Exception ignored in: <function DevTLS.create_ssl_context.<locals>.servername_callback at 0x000001C9DCFDE510>
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\Users\Eric\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python36\lib\site-packages\devtls\impl.py", line 26, in servername_callback
    p_crt, p_key = self._get_or_create_cert(domain)
  File "C:\Users\Eric\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python36\lib\site-packages\devtls\impl.py", line 43, in _get_or_create_cert
    crt, key = self._create_cert(domain)
  File "C:\Users\Eric\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python36\lib\site-packages\devtls\impl.py", line 52, in _create_cert
    csr = crypto_util.create_csr(key, domain = domain)
  File "C:\Users\Eric\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python36\lib\site-packages\devtls\crypto_util.py", line 23, in create_csr
    raise ValueError("either `common_name` or `domain` required")
ValueError: either `common_name` or `domain` required

XP’s always been kind of weird with Escargot, due to stuff with SSL, TLS and whatnot. I’ve fiddled with around with those settings in Internet Options to no avail. I imagine someone will likely figure something out come release.

I also played around with the Yahoo! Messenger frontend which works pretty well, all things considered. Seeing both of them communicating with each other is pretty sweet.

Neither WLM or YMSG support is available yet; gonna ask on behalf on the people working on it not to have them rush it. That being said, it seems there are just a few things before it’s production-ready and it really looks to be right around the corner.

Some big news today:

• One of my earliest true projects, PhotoPage is now open-sourced for posterity. http://github.com/dotcomboom/PhotoPage

• I have been making preparations for v4. For the time being, all current site content is going to be at http://dotcomboom.somnolescent.net/archives/v3. Here’s a preview of what’s to come:

• The Patio is back on Twenty Ten. Just such a comfy theme.

<?php
$today = (int)date('Yz');
    
srand($today);
    
$files = glob('*/*/thumbs/*.jpg');  // your folder structure goes here, my new one is like 2018/september/thumbs/*.jpg
$file = array_rand($files);

// open the file in a binary mode
$name = $files[$file];
$fp = fopen($name, 'rb');

// send the right headers
header("Content-Type: image/jpeg");
header("Content-Length: " . filesize($name));

// dump the picture and stop the script
fpassthru($fp);
exit;
?>

Embedded like this:

<img src="oftheday.php" alt="[img]">

(If you need to display EXIF information or link to the original image, see this script instead.)

Since it was surprisingly difficult for me to find, here is LimeChat 2.26 on SourceForge. It’s not the last version that can run on PPC, but it’s what I could find an active download link for. I might sift through the Wayback Machine if need be.

Runs great on my G4 with a quick setup.

May is Gopher month, and Pituophis, a project I hadn’t worked on since last year has finally gotten some of the treatment it deserved. 1.1 is now out with a bunch of changes.

I’ve refactored a ton of stuff, changed things around, etc. etc., and on top of that wrote a graphical Gopher client (in 200 lines!) to demonstrate it. Long timers may remember this essay I wrote on the Somnolescent blog mid-last year; while this doesn’t implement all that desktop integration stuff I’d love to see in a Gopher client eventually, it does implement the tree view part, at least partially. Consider it a proof of concept. Maybe not the most pretty looking thing in the world, but decently functional.

It doesn’t stop there though, as I caved and cleaned up Gophew a whole bunch, which is a couple of scripts for hosting a search-enabled server. It’s running on the new and rejuvenated Somnolescent Gopher server as we speak.

Looking forward to doing more with this protocol soon. It’s good to be back.

You can now grab the absolute latest AutoSite development build on AppVeyor. This has the latest features/fixes/bugs but does not represent the final RC. Everything that is included in a regular GitHub release is included here, including Core and Windows 10 metadata.

Feel free to grab a testing copy of RC3 and let me know what you think.

23 days without a devlog! But rest assured that RC3 is coming along, and it could be one of the largest RCs yet.

Start Page

A basic startpage has been added for when no sites are open. This replaces the “create or open a site folder” message in earlier versions:

It displays the Create or open a site folder option alongside your recently opened sites. I wouldn’t consider the design finalized just yet, but it serves its purpose.

Known extensions added

More extensions have been added; these are now editable and render without Apricot asking to make sure:

• phtml (an alternative, lesser-known extension for PHP)
• gophermap

Additionally some fixes were made to accommodate for gophermap being, well, not an extension.

The Great 2010 Migration

Visual Basic 2010 Express Edition is now being used for development, stepping up from 2008. For the foreseeable future .NET Framework 2.0 will still be targeted, though 4.0 is a possibility should the need arise.

Fun fact: did you know registration still works for 2010 Express? It does! No need for registry hacks to keep the Express trial period from expiring.. at least while it’s still up.

in/ renamed

The in/ folder has been renamed to pages/. AutoSite will prompt to convert a site with the old format.

Build panel updates

A button for running a Sanitary Build has been added to the right of the regular build option, which is now captioned to make it stick out more.

Quickstart

A new Quickstart dialog has been adding to hopefully make the AutoSite Method™ (patent pending) seem less daunting to first time users.

Removed features

Please pay your respects for:

• Pack installation, which was introduced in RC1. Although the feature worked, it made AutoSite unable to launch on older versions of Windows due to using a shell32 interop to extract archives. Although it may come back in the future, it’s disabled for now for the sake of compatibility.
• Legacy AutoSite build support. This was a tricky decision but I decided that it’d be for the better to streamline the build process, and it relied on a pyinstaller-based binary anyhow.

AutoSite Core on Visual Studio Code

I’ve gotten AutoSite Core to run as a task in Visual Studio Code. If you’re into that, have a peek at this wiki page.

Here’s a collage I did of the sites in the xxiivv webring. Screenshots were taken and downloaded using this script I hacked up:

import requests
import json
import time

with open("sites.json", "r") as read_file:
    sites = json.load(read_file)
    
    x = -1
    for site in sites:
        x += 1
        print(x, site['url'])
        try:
            r = requests.get("http://image.thum.io/get/noanimate/" + site['url'])
        except:
            time.sleep(2)
            r = requests.get("http://image.thum.io/get/noanimate/" + site['url'])
        title = ""
        try:
            title = "_" + site['title'].replace('\\', '')
        except:
            pass
            
        with open('images/' + str(x) + title + '.png', 'wb') as f:
            f.write(r.content)

They were then fed into this collage maker script to produce the output. Some sites displayed as blank; the only way to work around that would be to use thum.io‘s /wait/ feature; unfortunately that’s only for their registered plans. It still came out neat and I now know of a quick way to make collages.

Escaping attributes and conditionals

I’ve implemented a new thing that’ll be coming to RC3 pertaining to escaping attributes and conditionals. It’s ultra-helpful for documentation, as I have had issues before in trying to keep samples from being processed by Apricot. To escape, you’d add $ to the start of it.

$[#content#]
$[path=index.md]Escaped conditional[/path=]

To compare, here’s what you would’ve had to do before:

<span>&#91;</span>#root#]

Ich.

4/6/2020 – hahaha future dcb here! this broke my photography page that uses php so I removed this. sorry!

Modified dates

Yes, modified dates in AutoSite now! [#modified#] will spit out a date according to your system locale settings. I’ve been using this currently on my site.

Multiple display bug fix

There was a bug where if you had AutoSite open on a second monitor (or even just a higher-res display) and closed it, then reopened AutoSite where that point was not a part of your display setup, the window would be stuck off-screen with no easy way to bring it over. This drove me mad so I fixed it. 8)

Cheat!