I've often spoke of how much I want an easy-to-use bug tracking software, but I never did much about it since no free package was able to satisfy everything that I needed. Specifically, free, open source and working with MySQL. A big plus would've been if it would've been written in C# or Boo.

Now, bug tracking is certainly not a hard problem, is mostly direct work against database, some reports and a lot of thinking about work flow. Beyond that, it's mostly grunt work of adding features that are neccecary, but quite boring. (Prove me wrong, show me a feature of a bug tracking system that excites you.) Create a way to search bugs with enough flexibility is a must, for example, but it isn't really interesting.

I've now found a package that I'm glad to be able to use: FlySpray is a free (LGPL) bug tracking software that has quite a bit of features that I consider neccecary, has a good UI (unlike some other systems) and seems to be capable. It has one big minus as far as I'm concerned, which is that it's written in PHP. I don't have anything against PHP*, but it does bring back the bad old days of ASP and the mess that can happen there.

Unline the usual, the longest part was not cutomizing the UI to integrate with the rest of the site (although it took quite some time). The long part was integrating with the bug tracking system (and vice versa). It had to do with writing shell scripts on a remote system which I only have shell access to. I'm not a unix guy, and shell scripts require some deep knowledge in the ability of the system in order to get them to work as expected. I couldn't even get the script to execute properly and in the end I just used FlySpray' script as is. In addition: command line editing seems to require far too much knowledge.

Anyway, you can see the latest addition to my sites here: http://bugs.ayende.com

* I was able to understand enough that I could dig in the code and fix some problems without ever writing a single line of PHP code.

I've a strange problem, I want to allow access to my blog using http://blog.ayende.com/ but the way that sub domains are implemented on my host gets in the way. The problem is that it's possible to access sub domains by doing: http://www.ayende.com/blog/, so in essense I've two physical paths to the same place. Usually it means that I would've to take care for paths in the html, but here I've another problem.

The root site, http://www.ayende.com/ runs Cuyahoga and this require that the blog application (dasBlog) to remove several httpModules in its own web.config. That didn't cause troubles so far, but now that I want to change the path, I'm getting very nasty error about the non existing httpModules that I'm removing.

So right now I can either:

• Remove the entries from the web.config, which will enable blog.ayende.com but not www.ayende.com/blog
• Keep the entries, which will kill www.ayende.com/blog but enable blog.ayende.com (and better seperation between the applications).

Any suggestions how to make it work? Currently I'm going with the second method so as not to break links.

And if you can see this post, then the blogger API is now working.

"Base 8 is just like base 10, if you are missing two fingers." -- Tom Lehrer
"Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming." -- Kernigan
"SENILE.COM found... Out Of Memory." -- Tech Support Slogan

Is my defination to the point in time where you just can't think of anything else. Apperantly there is a bug in ReverseDOS that breaks my blog client from posting. I think I read about it in ReverseDOS' blog, and I'm nearly certain that this is the same bug. Strangely, it doesn't seem to affect the normal posting from a webpage.

Even after installing ReverseDOS, I still had problems with trackback spam. There were two problems that I had to solve, first, the configuration was set to only block referrer spam, so I added filters for POST as well.

Second, and that one was nasty, I've the following architecture on my server:

- Cuyahoga (serving www.ayende.com)

     - dasBlog (serving www.ayende.com/blog)

As you can see, the blog is a seperate application that is located on a directory inside Cuyahoga (and as a seperate IIS Application). The problem was that dasBlog, where I initially setup ReverseDOS has some of its setting inherited from the parent application. Apperantly this messed up ReverseDOS.

When I set it on the root application, it works. But, the usual catch22 applies, I needed to copy the dll file to both root/bin and to root/blog/bin in order to get them all to work. Yuck, talk about DRY violations.

BTW, GNU's WGet is very useful for these things.

I just had to test some things in the blog, and I got an exception and the yellow screen of death. I fought with it for a long time before I managed to get the exception's details, the parent application settings was to hide the exception messages. And ASP.Net resepcted that over the wishes of the current application wishes. Annoying.

Also, for some reason I can't get ReverseDOS to work correctly, and I still get trackback spam. Double Argh!

I added some more content to my site, and moved some things around, this is mainly because I realized that I've to update several places whenever I want to make a change. The idea was that every section of the site would have its own news section, so I could just go to the relevant part of the site, post the news, and be done with. The problem was that I also wanted it to appear on the main site (http://www.ayende.com/) which meant that I had to do it manually. As always, DRY is a good principal, and Cuyahoga allows you to set it up in a way that is easy and flexible.

The idea is to take advantage of RSS feeds from the news sections and the RemoteContent module in Cuyahoga, together, you create a master feed that collects all the info from all the news sections in the site, and then display it to the user. I think this is borderring on cheating, it is so easy to get a good front web page this way.

I made some other minor changes, the most critical one is increasing the font size on the site, since it looked really tiny to me.

Thanks Martin!!!

I just noticed that my blog was down, I'm pretty sure that was because of adding the popular lists, I removed it, and everything was back online again. Sorry for the down-time.

AngryPets' ReverseDOS

I read about it quite a bit, and after tha last round of trackback spams, which dasBlog still doesn't handle, I decided to give it a try. The webseite is very clear, and the installation is a piece of cake. Drop the file in the bin folder, add some lines in Web.Config, and you're done.

The nice thing about it is that it should stop a wide range spams (comments, CommentAPI, refferers, trackbacks) using a single tool and without modifying the application at all. It's like Ascpecting the application.

If you've a blog and want to reduce spam, check it out.

"A man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. He sits on a hot stove for a minute, it's longer than any hour. That is relativity." -- Albert Einstein
"A book is like a garden carried in the pocket." -- arab proverb
""I have PMS and a handgun. Any questions?" (I saw this on the back of a porsche 911 ... kinda makes you think :)" -- Bumper Sticker

I was busy most weekend with building the site and adding some content. Writing that article to CodeProject took a lot more time that I thought it would.

This was the first time in a long time that I actually had to take an interest in the HTML I'm writing, especially for CodeProject but also for my website. I can't believe that it's 2005 and I'm still having to deal with this silly stuff.

 

"I haven't lost my mind; it's backed up on tape somewhere." -- Tech Support Slogan
"Any piece of knowledge I acquire today has a value at this moment exactly proportioned to my skill to deal with it. Tomorrow, when I know more, I recall that piece of knowledge and use it better." -- mark van doren
"Adieu, mes amis. Je vais la gloire. (Farewell, my friends! I go to glory!)" -- Final words of Isadora Duncan, dancer, d. 1927

 

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