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I have a right to know! I'm getting married in four hundred and thirty years!

Monday, October 08

Geek

Request For Comments

Minx doesn't email you when new comments or private messages arrive.  It could - it would be easy to do - but I don't want to be sending out thousands (and eventually millions) of emails a day.  There are all sorts of problems with being a high-volume email source, and I'd rather simply not go there.

But it's very useful to be alerted to incoming comments (and private messages!) without having to visit your site every ten minutes.  So how else can this be achieved?

Well, there's RSS.  Minx already supports automatic RSS 2.0 and Atom feeds (and you can customise it to support other formats).  Why not add an RSS feed of comments?

Comments are public, so an RSS feed of them isn't an issue.  (Not true of private messages, but we'll get to that.)  But maybe you don't want everyone to see spam or unapproved comments.  Well, you can set up a hidden feed.  Or the system can do that automatically for you.  If your public comment feed is at http://mysite.mee.nu/feed/comments, and your private comment feed is at, say, http://mysite.mee.nu/feed/comments/aj69c0, you'd have to try an average of a billion combinations before getting access to someone's private comment feed. 

There would be a link in the editing interface so you could subscribe with one click, and easy-peasy, comment notification.

I could certainly do the same with private messages.  If you're sensitive about those and worried about that 1 in a billion chance, I can have an option where the RSS feed only shows the arrival of a new message, and not the sender or contents.

I could also do secured feeds, but that's more fiddly and many popular readers don't support them.

So, what do you think?

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:48 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 291 words, total size 2 kb.

Thursday, October 04

Geek

You Can't CNAME A Zone

Damn.

One of the neat features of Minx is that it runs across multiple servers, and it doesn't matter which server you end up on - any site can be served by any server.

For mee.nu and mee.fm this works just fine; I just set up the DNS for those domains with multiple wildcards and I get round-robin load balancing for as many domains as my users create.

With mu.nu it's a little trickier, because I have a few hundred pre-existing zone files.  The easiest thing would be to change each zone file as I migrate the blogs, and CNAME that domain to mu.nu except for email.

Except that you can't do that.  I'm not sure exactly why it's forbidden, but it is indeed forbidden.  I can still create one or many A records to target the servers, but then I have the server IPs defined in a few hundred zone files, at least until the migration is complete and I can drop CPanel.

Hosting personal domains (non-mee/mu) is even worse.  Redirects will work, of course, but redirects are ugly.  Putting in the IP addresses will work too - until the IPs change.  Delegating your DNS to my servers will work, but then I have to look after a squillion zone files, and you can't easily point your email elsewhere unless I write a DNS management front end.

Bleh.

Anyone know of a better way to do this?

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:24 AM | Comments (11) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 243 words, total size 1 kb.

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