I came up with an amazing game, it is called "What Is The Most Amusing Way You Can Devise For Anneka Rice To Die?". Traditionally it should involve the phrase "in front of the entire orphanage".

If that one gets boring, you can also try playing "What Would Be The Most Amusing Description of the Death of Anneka Rice To Scream At The Point Of Orgasm?"

unf unf unf unf unf ANNEKA RICE BEING NIBBLED BY DUCKS ugh.

In other news, semisubmersibles are still insanely cool.

Toby: now now, don't get greedy. You already have one rather lovely 'back-end' ;)

hello people *waves* :)

Errm, so where is this 'ere BIAS install and accompanying instructions for breaking it? I cannae code a front-end wi'out a back-end, cap'n!

Ok, approach 2 it is then. The edits problem could be kinda worked around by getting the web interface to hoover up the last modified time of the file before presenting the edit dialog, then doing a compare of timestamps when you click "post". Conflicts would present you with the existing post and allow you to splice in the changes. That approach still has a minor race hazard and won't solve non-web hazards, but it's better than nowt.

Approach 2 is pretty trivial on my end; the original BIAS filestructure had a username field in the post filename.

At present it is last edit goes but there's no reason why we couldn't bung version control on posts if it turned out to be necessary. Honestly the system was designed with this site and jjwk in mind; it's not meant for high-traffic participatory websites, because they all have a fetish for relational databases anyway.

Oooooh baby SELECT me with your GROUP.

Weeeell... We could do one of two things:

1. Stick with the current model, give everyone a Unix user account (even if it has no shell), then bung a setuid progglet in to do the post upload,
2. Add the username in as an extra field somewhere, possibly as part of the filename or sommat.

The first method ain't so pretty for making the system hackproof, but at least it reduces the user management problem. The second (probably more sane) method is all well and good, but involves more coding overhead on your part.

One thing that did strike me is how does BIAS track edits? If it's all files, do the files get shunted out of the upload directory and version controlled, or is it all edits to active content and the last person wins? The latter might be a bad plan on communal blogs where the admins may want to vet content, though this is less of an issue on low-post-volume sites like this.

To be honest, BIAS's API is currently pretty much "bung text files in a directory that's been set in the configuration file to be a directory of posts", and likewise for photographs. I can't see any real concurrency issues unless someone posts twice with the same username in the same millisecond, which is extremely unlikely to happen. Or if two people edit a post at the same time. All the black magic is done by the renderer, as befits something that was designed to be driven with 'vi' and 'scp'.

The only real issue is that currently there's no real concept of a BIAS user, as it just uses the UNIX filesystem permissions stuff, so we'd probably need a login system. How would you like to do that?

Certainly sir - I'll add it to the myriad of other projects on my "Real Soon Now™" list ;)

Seriously though, I don't mind having a stab at it, provided interfacing to BIAS isn't too painful. I'm assuming BIAS itself will handle concurrency issues gracefully - writing multi-user safe PHP isn't the nicest of things to do. Give me an API and show me where to point it, white man.

So, anyone here want to write a web front-end to BIAS? I'm not sure we can ask the warbeck regulars to post using 'vi'.

I am becoming totally addicted to this. It is incredibly fascinating, inspiring, terrifying, pretty, and occasionally even emotionally moving.

Also, I'd like one of them to make my lunches from now on, please.

I AM BUNNY
I AM BUNNY

I AM

I AM BUNNY

Random Easter Bunny

Wow, Jimmy with a beard!

I'm not
I'm not
I'm not
I'm not
I'm not

i am santa
i am santa

i am

i am santa