CodewiseBlog is the blog system I wrote to power this site. It's a very robust system, supporting multiple users from the same codebase and database, customizable skins using a powerful skin engine, and everything else you can see here. It's fast, it's easy to run, and it's open source, available under the GNU General Public License.

The project is hosted at GitHub. It requires only PHP, Apache, and MySQL.

    – William R. Fraser

Due to recent unacceptable site performance, I've decided to move Codewise.org and all associated domains to a different hosting provider ASAP.

I've informed WestHost to not renew my contract, so the account will expire some time in late August. However, I plan to have all sites moved well before then.

An early apology to all Codewise.org users (yes, both of you): site performance has sucked. I know. And it's probably going to get worse before it gets better. A good idea would be to not change any of your data over the next few days, as it's migrated to a new host. Or, if you do, please let me know so your changes are not lost.

Currently I'm examining my options with regards to hosting (specifically, VPS providers - Codewise's configuration is a little complex for your ordinary web host). I'd love to go for Linode, but they're a little out of my price range right now. Maybe in the future. Other than that, looking good so far is Spry's VPSLink subsidiary. If anyone knows anything, good or bad, about them, let me know, or any other suggestions. I won't be purchasing a contract for a few days due to money being tight (I'm setting up a new apartment, and things have to be paid for...).

_WRF

Earlier this week I committed a lot of changes to the CWB subversion repository - everything done to the code since November 30, 2006.

Updates include:

• New URL scheme that doesn't use request variables, but path info instead - access blog entries as blog/article/article_name and such.
• Separate default skins for the site and the control panel
• Handle custom urls and both multi-user modes (subdomain and non-subdomain mode) much better
• Setting a user's status to "closed" applies a different, configurable skin to their page, and removes them from the frontpage
• imageverify automatically cleans out database records older than two days
• more effort to sanitize and entity-escape Unicode characters is made
• added thumbnail image caching for the frontpage

Most of these changes were committed in svn revision 416.

Because of all these changes, the installer script probably doesn't work (I haven't tried it yet though), and the skin documentation is getting out of date. I'll fix both of these when I have time. However, neither of these are very high priority, as manual install is still pretty easy, and the old documentation is still valid - nothing has been removed, things have only been added.

So much has changed now, if anyone wants to install CodewiseBlog on their site, send me an email and I'll help you install the current dev version (follow the link at the end for my contact info). The last release is badly out of date now, and I do not recommend using it. I'm not planning on doing another release for a while, but if there's enough interest, I'll fix the installer and documentation and package a proper release now.

_WRF