Blog

A very short entry this time. I am on vacation and I am going to stay some days in my hometown, spending some time time with my family here. So I decided to do a visit to my Nologin colleagues and update the blog again (long time since the last upgrade, remember that I only can do this when I am in Zaragoza and I have some free time to go to Nologin's office). This way I can kill two birds with one stone, visiting my friends and upgrading the blog system.

In general I have updated the system to the last debian version (10.0) with all the components inside the distribution (MariaDB, Apache2,...). All packages are renewed automatically except the PHP version, several versions can co-exists at the same time into the system, and the apache module was upgraded to last 7.3 explicitly after installing the new packages:

a2dismod php7.0
a2enmod php7.3

The serendipity (s9y) PHP blog application has been upgraded to current version 2.3.1 (and also my two extra plugins recaptcha and social). The blog seems to be running without any issue. Let's see if I have not missed something.

Best regards!

A quick entry about the blog this time. I am in my vacation period for Christmas so I decided to go to my ex-colleagues' offices and upgrade the blog. It was very outdated and it was really needed. Besides I have taken advantage of the situation and some little improvements have been Incorporated.

1. Debian and related packages (apache, php, mariadb,...) have been updated to the last stable debian.

2. Serendipity/s9y blog system upgraded to 2.x versions.

3. The re-captcha plugin has been also updated and now the version v2 is used for comments (spam is an important problem and I prefer to use the last version of the google service).

4. The social plugin has been added to the blog too (twitter, facebook, g+ and linked-in links for the moment). I removed the previous buttons.

5. Now https access is available. I have changed the default location of the blogs to be secure. If you want to use it please change your bookmark to the https version (I cannot configure a redirection because there are other blogs in the machine that are generating non-secure links which would not work).

That is all for today. I know that the improvements are just little differences but the system is a bit better now and, more important, it is updated to today's versions.

Happy new year!

A very short entry this time just to inform that the blog's theme has been modified to be responsive to low resolution devices (mobile phones mainly). The blog now passes the google's mobile-friendly test.

It is known that google is going to modify their algorithm in order to take into account the mobile friendliness of each page. Besides my old colleagues upgraded the blog system some weeks ago (thanks guys) and some of my previous modifications (share buttons and video tag) were lost. Therefore I decided to modify (slightly) my old Idea theme (designed by Evan Nemerson) and create a new one that will not be replaced again by a new update.

The final main idea is that the right menu is transformed in a top menu in narrow devices (less than 800px). Now all the options inside it (recent entries, comments and so on) can be collapsed and expanded using jQuery, but by default they are presented collapsed when on top and expanded when displayed on the left. The little changes that were removed by the upgrade are again in place.

All the commented changes have been integrated as a new theme in the s9y installation. I changed today to this new theme, so if you see some misplaced elements please force the browser to reload modified static contents.

Sorry for any inconvenience.