LiveJournal Development

Multiple videos in one post

Mon, 12 May 2008 08:35:44 GMT

I have noticed that the code patch that allows a user to post more than one video in a post doesn't seem to have been ported to the open-source code.

Does anyone have a code patch for that and/or know what routine handles it? Thanks.

Adding comments via a client with XML-RPC?

Mon, 12 May 2008 08:35:38 GMT

Hi! I'm writing a LiveJournal client using the XML-RPC interface. What I can't seem to find in the documentation (and it may not exist) is a way to use XML-RPC to add comments to Friends entries, or even the authenticated user's own journal. The latter is actually more interesting to me -- to be able to reply to comments in your own journal.

Is that possible? Am I missing something? The only other way I could see to do this would be to basically do a POST request to talkpost_do.bml, but that seems clumsy.

Any thoughts or help would be appreciated.

Cannot delete comments, edit posts

Wed, 07 May 2008 19:16:24 GMT

I have a bunch of users who are all having the same problems:

a. When they try to delete one of their own comments in a community, they get a popup box with an exclamation point (!) and no other explanation - in other words, there is some unspecified error and they cannot delete the comment.

b. When they try to edit a post they have made to a community, they are not allowed to - it's greyed out as though the post belongs to someone else.

Any ideas? Thanks.

Hiding Also Friend Of...

Mon, 05 May 2008 23:28:17 GMT

Is it possible to hide the 'Also Friend Of...' section, I know you can hide friends by configuring that in the ljconfig.pl but I would much like to hide also friend of because I give the option for new users to add me, news and the system account as friends, and I rarely if ever add them back but it still shows them as having me as a friend on my profile...and that's a lot of people.

I did try to use force empty friends for multiple people but it gave me an error I was using something like:

%FORCE_EMPTY_FRIENDS = (
'1' => 'system'
'2' => 'jimmy'
'12' => 'news'
);

What would the proper syntax be? I'm no pro or even beginner with Perl, but would I need commas at the end of those?

Thanks guys!

Master-master setup in ljconfig.pl

Sun, 04 May 2008 21:00:02 GMT

Okay,

I finally moved to a master-master DB setup with InnoDB. Now I am wondering if anyone else out there has suggestions on the best way to set these up in ljconfig.pl. Any examples of how the config will best work would be greatly appreciated.

Watermarking imges.

Sat, 03 May 2008 20:05:40 GMT

Does anyone know of any possible ways of watermarking an image hosted on a server with the logged in users ID?

It's a big problem for some communities; people leaking images.

I was thinking of that small off-site image creation program someone wrote many months ago, I don't know if anyone rememebrs it? It created the text of the persons ID who was reading the post in an image, so to anyone who read a journal entry with these little images in, and thought they were reading a post about themselves.
The posts were sort of like "I had a dream about last night!!"

If a way could be found to do that again, or some other facility, webmasters could create watermarking routines for images hosted with them and this would solve all the problematic allogations that usually go on.

Livejournal and Adsense API

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 04:24:51 GMT

Quick question for the group here -- has anyone done any work integrating Adsense API with Livejournal? (Adsense API is Adsense's revenue sharing format; Google automatically splits the revenue between users and the developer's website.)

Adsense API is a bit of a PITA to implement -- I've got an awesome programmer who I'm confident can do the work as he's implemented it with another application for me (and my site is already approved by Google for it) but if there's an open source mod out there already, that would be lovely.

-- Leva

User Data

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 00:54:56 GMT

There are a variety of links listed on http://www.livejournal.com/bots/ for acquiring data by means other than "screen-scraping" user pages; including friend data and interest data in a convenient line-separated format. Does LiveJournal provide any similar mechanism for getting a journal/community's list of userpics or tags? Because those are the ones that my program is currently "screen-scraping" (but only when requested by the user, with the results saved).

/support/help.bml Code

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 00:54:47 GMT

Hey,

I have users who want to help out other users in the support queue, but whenever they try to visit the page (by clicking on the link to go to the queue from the /support/index.bml page they're told the support queue is only available to people with the privs. So I had a peek at the code in the /support/help.bml page and there was this chunk of code:

return $ML{'.interim'} if
(!$remote || !$remote->{'_priv'}) &&
($r->header_in("Referer") eq "$LJ::SITEROOT/support/" || $r->header_in("Referer") eq "$LJ::SITEROOT/support/index.bml" || $r->header_in("Referer") eq "$LJ::SITEROOT/support/submit.bml");

It makes sense to me about what it's doing, but not why it's there...anyone know why you would block people from clicking that link? I tried it on LiveJournal and it works as intended, it shows you the queue and allows users to submit screened responses which is what I am going for...

In my database I have categories with public_help turned off (0) and allow_screened turned on (1).

So now I appear to be getting the sam effect as on LiveJournal, normal users can submit a screened response and I as the admin can change categories, rename topics, etc...and when someone who is not logged in viewed a thread it says they need to login to help others out, although they can still see all the information about the user (styles, email validated, etc...) so maybe the better idea here would be to insert some code that made sure the user was logged in and if so, then they can see all the support threads, maybe a better idea to toss that error out instead of saying users need special privs...

But then maybe I am mistaken and am looking at this the wrong way!

Any help on why that chunk of code is there would be great... :)

Still having probs with User Search

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 00:54:34 GMT

Once again, I am attempting to install LJ-UserSearch. Everything seems to go fine till you get to the last line of install-into-ljhome:

perl -pe 's/$ENV{LJHOME}\///' < $LJHOME/cgi-bin/i386-linux-thread-multi/auto/LJ/UserSearch/.packlist

It errors out because there isn't a packlist - heck, there isn't a directory structure like that which would contain a file known as .packlist!

Something is either missing or out of date, so I'd appreciate help. Thanks!

How do I make purged usernames available?

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 00:54:13 GMT

I've deleted and purged a bunch of usernames. How do I make them available to my users?

Email all users?

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 23:10:45 GMT

Is there a way to email all users when you have an announcement?

Bug with http://www.livejournal.com/stats/latest-img.bml

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 23:10:33 GMT

I've noticed a strange behavior with the "latest image" rss feed located at http://www.livejournal.com/stats/latest-img.bml

When I monitor the feed closely I can watch as new images appear at the beginning of the list between each refresh. But what I've noticed is it will, all of a sudden, throw away all the current images and display a completely different list. And then the strange part is shortly later it will revert back to the previous list and go on about its way until the cycle repeats. It also appears that when it jumps to the other list, the images that it returns are ones that were displayed previous (usually around 5-15 minutes ago).

It does this frequently, all throughout the day. I can't pinpoint when exactly it first began, but I know that before a few months ago I never saw this happen.

At first I thought the problem was on my end or a strange caching problem with my ISP, but I've been able to duplicate the problem on different browsers and from different ISPs.

I just thought I'd bring this to someone's attention, as this behavior makes it much less useful to me.

I'd also like to thank Live Journal for providing these kinds of backend data-mining feeds, they provide for some very interesting data that I've never seen available from anybody else on the net.

Thank you,
Cory

Sat, 12 Apr 2008 20:49:35 GMT

Hey, Ive checked the FAQs but can't find the answer I'm lookin for. Is there a simple URL I can use to request an atom feed of just a journals entries that have a specific tag? Something like
http://exampleusername.livejournal.com/data/atom?tag=news or such without resorting to the API? Thanks!

State of play on OpenID?

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 20:18:31 GMT

Hi all,

I was wondering where the LJ codebase was in regards to OpenID integration. At present, we're a sort of semi-consumer; you can log in with an OpenID identity, but not much else. Being able to tie an identity to an existing account would be a major plus, and an excellent step towards distributed identity management - bridging an identity with LJ-generated FOAF. Plus, does our codebase provide OpenID identities that can be used to log into other sites?

Cheers,

Earle.

Wed, 09 Apr 2008 19:01:39 GMT

I'm not sure this is the right comm, but I hope so. I was taking a look at the post variables submitted when you post to a journal and I saw three I wasnt sure about. lj_form_auth , chal and response. These all seem to be generated strings. How are they generated? Can they be the same when posting to multiple journals? Thanks in advace for any help!

FotoBilder - code?

Tue, 08 Apr 2008 00:47:27 GMT

Where can a person find the source code for FotoBilder?

Bug reports?

Sun, 06 Apr 2008 19:24:45 GMT

Where should I file a ticket for LJ code? The particular issue is that LJ's server either disregards or mishandles the If-Modified-Since header of a request, resulting in repeated downloads of pages already existent on the client.

Multiple LJ backup software has a syncitems bug.

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 17:31:32 GMT

Many LJ backup software, including the official jbackup.pl client, have a bug when doing syncitems where the first batch of items is all comments (i.e. no posts). LiveJournal Backup / Search Tool and ljArchive also appear to the susceptible to this bug.

I noticed it because my journal is like this and after the LJ-Sec developer reviewed it, he found that the first batch of syncitems for me was all comments and then later I tried experimenting with various backup software and found this bug manifested in many of them.

It seems that most software operates under the assumption that there's at least one post in the first batch and therefore gets stuck trying to do syncitems or otherwise doesn't do the backup properly.

In jbackup.pl, if you haven't created a GDBM database before, $lastsync won't be set and normally this isn't a problem, because if there's a single post ("L" type) in the first batch of syncitems, it will update $lastsync.

This fix shouldn't cause any problems, unless I'm mistaken. You only need to modify do_sync's main while loop as follows:

foreach my $item (@{$hash->{syncitems} || []}) {
    # Update $lastsync regardless of item type
    $lastsync = $item->{'time'}
        if $item->{'time'} gt $lastsync;
    next unless $item->{item} =~ /L-(\d+)/;
    $synccount++;
    $sync{$1} = [ $item->{action}, $item->{'time'} ];
    $lastsync = $item->{'time'}
#   if $item->{'time'} gt $lastsync;
#   $bak{"event:realtime:$1"} = $item->{'time'};
}
$bak{'event:lastsync'} = $lastsync;

Side note/question: jbackup.pl, when run via ActiveState's windows perl client, seems to be really slow (running for minutes on a Pentium 4 system) in processing comments AFTER they've been downloaded, but is fast when comments aren't processed at all. This holds true even if no new comments have been added when it attempts to check for new comments and appears to take about as long as when there are many new comments.

There's not a lot of CPU usage, but there is a lot of hard drive access. I'm not sure why it would do this, especially if there are new no comments and therefore the database doesn't need to be updated, nor any new comments downloaded.

Bug with svn copy of OS code

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 06:56:15 GMT

I've been having trouble updating the code via svn, so I erased everything, and got a new copy.

I haven't touched anything and this is what I get when I try to restart apache - something is obviously missing in the svn copy of the LJ code:

[root@commie ~]# service httpd start
Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string at /home3/commie/public_html/cgi-bin/ljdefaults.pl line 43.
Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string at /home3/commie/public_html/cgi-bin/ljdefaults.pl line 63.
Use of uninitialized value in string at /home3/commie/public_html/cgi-bin/ljdefaults.pl line 65.
Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string at /home3/commie/public_html/cgi-bin/ljdefaults.pl line 65.
[Wed Apr 2 00:38:56 2008] [error] Error loading event module 'LJ::Event::JournalNewComment': Can't locate Captcha/reCAPTCHA.pm in @INC (@INC contains: /home3/commie/public_html/cgi-bin, /home3/commie/public_html/src/s2, CODE(0x97acb78), /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.8/i686-linux, /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.8, /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/i686-linux, /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8, /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.7, /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.6, /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.5, /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl, ., /usr/local/apache/, /usr/local/apache/lib/perl) at /home3/commie/public_html/cgi-bin/talklib.pl line 21\nBEGIN failed--compilation aborted at /home3/commie/public_html/cgi-bin/talklib.pl line 21.\nCompilation failed in require at /home3/commie/public_html/cgi-bin/LJ/Comment.pm line 18.\nCompilation failed in require at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/Class/Autouse.pm line 410.\n at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/Class/Autouse.pm line 410\nBEGIN failed--compilation aborted at /home3/commie/public_html/cgi-bin/LJ/Event/JournalNewComment.pm line 4.\nCompilation failed in require at (eval 901) line 2.\nBEGIN failed--compilation aborted at (eval 901) line 2.\nCompilation failed in require at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/Class/Autouse.pm line 410.\n at /home3/commie/public_html/cgi-bin/weblib.pl line 20\nBEGIN failed--compilation aborted at /home3/commie/public_html/cgi-bin/weblib.pl line 20.\nCompilation failed in require at /home3/commie/public_html/cgi-bin/LJ/NotificationMethod/Email.pm line 8.\nCompilation failed in require at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/Class/Autouse.pm line 410.\n at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/Class/Autouse.pm line 410\nBEGIN failed--compilation aborted at /home3/commie/public_html/cgi-bin/LJ/NotificationMethod.pm line 11.\nCompilation failed in require at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/Class/Autouse.pm line 410.\n at /home3/commie/public_html/cgi-bin/ljlib.pl line 23\nBEGIN failed--compilation aborted at /home3/commie/public_html/cgi-bin/LJ/Subscription.pm line 9.\nCompilation failed in require at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/Class/Autouse.pm line 410.\n at /home3/commie/public_html/cgi-bin/Apache/LiveJournal/Interface/AtomAPI.pm line 15\nBEGIN failed--compilation aborted at /home3/commie/public_html/cgi-bin/LJ/User.pm line 39.\nCompilation failed in require at /home3/commie/public_html/cgi-bin/ljlib.pl line 23.\nBEGIN failed--compilation aborted at /home3/commie/public_html/cgi-bin/ljlib.pl line 23.\nCompilation failed in require at /home3/commie/public_html/cgi-bin/fbupload.pl line 10.\nCompilation failed in require at /home3/commie/public_html/cgi-bin/Apache/LiveJournal/Interface/AtomAPI.pm line 15.\nCompilation failed in require at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/Class/Autouse.pm line 410.\n at (eval 2) line 1\nBEGIN failed--compilation aborted at /home3/commie/public_html/cgi-bin/Apache/LiveJournal.pm line 31.\nCompilation failed in require at /home3/commie/public_html/cgi-bin/modperl_subs.pl line 11.\nBEGIN failed--compilation aborted at /home3/commie/public_html/cgi-bin/modperl_subs.pl line 11.\nCompilation failed in require at /home3/commie/public_html/cgi-bin/modperl.pl line 20.\nCompilation failed in require at (eval 2) line 1.\n
Syntax error on line 598 of /usr/local/apache/conf/httpd.conf:
Error loading event module 'LJ::Event::JournalNewComment': Can't locate Captcha/reCAPTCHA.pm in @INC (@INC contains: /home3/commie/public_html/cgi-bin, /home3/commie/public_html/src/s2, CODE(0x97acb78), /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.8/i686-linux, /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.8, /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/i686-linux, /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8, /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.7, /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.6, /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.5, /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl, ., /usr/local/apache/, /usr/local/apache/lib/perl) at /home3/commie/public_html/cgi-bin/talklib.pl line 21
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at /home3/commie/public_html/cgi-bin/talklib.pl line 21.
Compilation failed in require at /home3/commie/public_html/cgi-bin/LJ/Comment.pm line 18.
Compilation failed in require at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/Class/Autouse.pm line 410.
at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/Class/Autouse.pm line 410
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at /home3/commie/public_html/cgi-bin/LJ/Event/JournalNewComment.pm line 4.
Compilation failed in require at (eval 901) line 2.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at (eval 901) line 2.
Compilation failed in require at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/Class/Autouse.pm line 410.
at /home3/commie/public_html/cgi-bin/weblib.pl line 20
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at /home3/commie/public_html/cgi-bin/weblib.pl line 20.
Compilation failed in require at /home3/commie/public_html/cgi-bin/LJ/NotificationMethod/Email.pm line 8.
Compilation failed in require at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/Class/Autouse.pm line 410.
at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/Class/Autouse.pm line 410
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at /home3/commie/public_html/cgi-bin/LJ/NotificationMethod.pm line 11.
Compilation failed in require at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/Class/Autouse.pm line 410.
at /home3/commie/public_html/cgi-bin/ljlib.pl line 23
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at /home3/commie/public_html/cgi-bin/LJ/Subscription.pm line 9.
Compilation failed in require at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/Class/Autouse.pm line 410.
at /home3/commie/public_html/cgi-bin/Apache/LiveJournal/Interface/AtomAPI.pm line 15
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at /home3/commie/public_html/cgi-bin/LJ/User.pm line 39.
Compilation failed in require at /home3/commie/public_html/cgi-bin/ljlib.pl line 23.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at /home3/commie/public_html/cgi-bin/ljlib.pl line 23.
Compilation failed in require at /home3/commie/public_html/cgi-bin/fbupload.pl line 10.
Compilation failed in require at /home3/commie/public_html/cgi-bin/Apache/LiveJournal/Interface/AtomAPI.pm line 15.
Compilation failed in require at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/Class/Autouse.pm line 410.
at (eval 2) line 1
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at /home3/commie/public_html/cgi-bin/Apache/LiveJournal.pm line 31.
Compilation failed in require at /home3/commie/public_html/cgi-bin/modperl_subs.pl line 11.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at /home3/commie/public_html/cgi-bin/modperl_subs.pl line 11.
Compilation failed in require at /home3/commie/public_html/cgi-bin/modperl.pl line 20.
Compilation failed in require at (eval 2) line 1.

/etc/init.d/httpd start: httpd could not be started
[root@commie ~]#

Embedding Adobe Flash applets.

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 17:12:43 GMT

Isn't there a potential security/privacy/nuisance issue with allowing people to embed arbitrary Flash applets from any website?

I'm not that familiar with Flash's capabilities in terms of reading from or manipulating the web browser, but I know a few other things that can be done.

At the very least, people can use Flash cookies to track users even if their IP address changes. I'm sure that people wouldn't appreciate this.

And of course, it can be made to be a huge nuisance by vastly slowing down a computer and potentially crashing the web browser. Of course, it can also display arbitrary video and play arbitrary audio.

The solution to this, which I previously mistakenly thought was already implemented, is to only allow flash from certain trusted sites, such as YouTube. Since 99% of embedded Flash on LiveJournal is from a relatively small list of websites, this shouldn't be hard to maintain, especially with a submission form to add new websites.

Frustrating error on email notifications

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 05:42:22 GMT

My account is #3 on CJ, and from the beginning, I've had troubles getting notifications by email. It's very strange, too, because if I post to a comm and get comments, I get notified, but if I post to my own journal and get comments, I'm not notified. I've also tried three different email addresses, from three different domains, and I've verified that the notices are not going to the spam folder.

What file or routine handles notifications? I need to find out what it is about my account, specifically, that is not letting the notifications go through. Thanks.

export_comments and picture_keyword?

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 05:42:05 GMT

I would appreciate it beyond all measure if export_comments.bml provided picture_keyword data for comments. The HTML pages have it, but of course I can't do that because I don't want to be a bad bot.

New Error

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 05:41:44 GMT

I just recently updated CommieJournal with the latest LJ OS code and now I'm getting this error when I go to view a full profile:

[Error: Can't locate object method "num_comments_received" via package "LJ::User" at '/home3/commie/public_html/htdocs/userinfo.bml' line 1206. @ commie.arroyotoad.com]

And, obviously, it's not showing the number of comments the person has received.

Help? Thanks.

Bugs?

Sun, 30 Mar 2008 18:05:40 GMT

Hi,

Wading through the LJ code, I'm finding bugs... ;-)

How do you report them?

Regards,
Lars