No, we're not dead!

... just busy

We're all pretty busy at the moment, both with work, family and other projects. I know edmz has written some import utility which will be in CVS soon, so there at least is some movement here. So don't worry!

I am working on a port of bbps to the rails platform. At the moment this is just a slow-moving pet / hobby project of mine, but it might prove interesting. Rails offers a lot of interesting stuff and it's fun to learn too. I've got a very premature pre-alpha-ish demo of the port up at http://lapis.wzzrd.com. It doesn't work perfectly by far, but then again, it hasn't made smoke come out of my computer either :)

In case I'm not able to write the coming weeks: have a good Christmas, a happy New Year and I'm sure you'll more of us in 2006!

Working towards 0.8

Chris and me have been working pretty hard this week to bring bbps towards new features and, eventually, a new release. We've done a lot of bugfixes ourselves and we applied some patches either submitted to us through Sourceforge or directly. Everyone who submitted a patch or a bug, you know who you are: thanks a lot for helping out!

A quick glance at what we have done so far:

• orphaned bookmarks now show up in searches
• the redirect error caused by a double slash at the end of a URL is solved
• you can go to a random bookmark by clicking on 'Random site' for those really bored :-)
• we added a checkbox to the adminpanel to enable rechecking a site for a favicon
• the bookmark - tag relations editor is no longer generating duplicate tags
  
• duplicate tags are banned alltogether, which is why you need to use the upgrade_schema.sql file when upgrading!
• lotsa' more stuff, bugfixes and cleanup

Once you install the new version make sure you check out the new design. It's only a subtle change in the appearance of the program, but it looks SO much better. Just check it out, we're sure you'll agree! Send Chris some fanmail to thank him for it. I know I did! ;-)

A last remark: our demo site seems to be b0rked. Sorry. I'm working on it.

Favicon support in CVS, a quick Howto

To enable favicon support in bbps-cvs, follow this quick how-to:

• First, of course, checkout bbps from cvs. This is at your own risk! Please be aware of this! CVS software is in beta state at best and can mess up your install!


• Then, copy the _init.php.org file to _init.php and edit it to suit your needs. Set $CONF_ENABLE_FAVICONS to TRUE and fill in the directory to hold your favicons in $CONF_FAVICON_DIR.
  


• If necessary, create the directory filled in above. Be sure that your webserver can write to this directory. Either chown or chmod it to enable this in Linux. Windows surely has means of doing this too ;)


• Then, and this is important, because you will see no error if you do not do this, but favicon support won't work: edit php.ini. Be sure to set allow_url_fopen to On.


• Restart your webserver.

You're done. Favicon support will work now, for new bookmarks. Support for favicons for older bookmarks will follow shortly.

Obligatory screenie:

Ouch!

So, we've all been away for a few weeks, either just relaxing or on a well-deserved holiday. And when I came home there were some freshly baked new bugs waiting on our sf.net site.

To start things of as they should be: sorry. It has taken far to long for us to reply to the bugreports. It's not as if there were many of them, but nonetheless, we should have.

To the people reporting the bugs: thanks! We will try to fix your reports in cvs as soon as possible!

For the rest of you: bbps development will be gaining pace again after the summer, so keep sending us your bugreports, your fanmail, your links to your working copy of bbps (always nice to see someone enjoy your work!) and your underwear^H^H^H ideas.

Thanks for using bbps and have a good (remainder of the) summer!

Keywords converted to tags

As of now, the bbps development team has converted the 'keywords' in bbps to 'tags'. We found that the word 'tag' relates much better to the concept currently used in other open source projects, like Gregarius and other bookmarking programs like del.icio.us. Besides, we received word from members of the community, telling us that the concept 'keyword' is confusing from a programmers point of view.

Anyway, check out current cvs to start using tags and try out some new features for adding tags to bookmarks!

Lay-out bug in IE fixed

Thanks to Ron Ridley, the bug which made bbps show up in a weird way in Internet Explorer has been fixed. We received a patch from Ron providing code to work around some anomaly in the IE rendering engine which b0rked our lay-out. Cheers Ron!

Of course anyone is welcome to follow Ron's example in fixing bugs in bbps! Have fun doing so! We're looking forward to receive more patches :-)

You can expect the patch in our cvs repository very soon for those of you who are anxious to try.

Edit: I decided to check out the patch in a Windows install I did for this purpose in QEMU - which is a marvellous piece of programming by the way - and in my humble installation, the patch works flawlessly. We can finally say again that bbps works in IE without hickups :)

Demo site up!

The bbps-project has put up a demo site of it's software. Please, go there and take a look! We are currently filling the demo site with interesting links, so you can actually find some interesting information there. We try to keep the demo site up-to-date with the latest version of our software, so you can take a sneak-peak at the latest features. Please inform us, if you notice bugs or missing features!