Category Archives: Known

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So, a few weeks ago I hacked together some logs for the #knownchat IRC channel.

I accomplished this by hacking together a very simple IRC logging bot. This bot will sit on an IRC channel and output logs in github friendly Markdown (so you can post them to a repo and give people an easy way to read them).

Since it was just as easy to write a flexible bot than a single use bot, I thought others might be interest in it.

Usage

The bot isn’t fancy, but it does the job.

It only supports logging of a single channel per instance, but it will interface with a nickserv server to identify itself, and will log each day’s activity in a separate file (in nicely sortable YYYY-MM-DD.md format) in a directory per channel.

Fire it up in a screen on an always on machine and you should start collecting logs straight away. To create the logs for #knownchat, I turned it’s channel dir into a git repo, and periodically push on a cronjob, but you might find other ways of doing things.

To keep things quiet, it’ll only log chat, not channel messages (leave/join etc).

Hopefully someone else’ll find this useful!

» Visit the project on Github...

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Sitemaps are specially crafted XML files, usually located at https://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml, that help search engines better crawl your site.

It came up in conversation on IRC that there was a need for a sitemap plugin for Known, and because such a plugin would be useful to myself as well as others (and because I had a little bit of time while waiting for a painfully slow set of Vagrant builds, so I thought I’d put something together.

So, over on github, I’ve put together a quick plugin that will automatically generate a basic sitemap plugin for your site, as well as update your robots.txt accordingly.

When you first visit your sitemap.xml file a sitemap will be generated and cached. When you create new posts, this file will be automatically updated.

It’s pretty simple at the moment, but as usual, pull requests are welcome!

» Visit the project on Github...

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IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is a protocol that lets you communicate in text based chat rooms over the internet, and is basically what we all used to use in the 90’s before Twitter or WhatsApp. Think of it like multi-player notepad.

Most folk don’t even know it exists, but many technical people (especially those in the free software community) use IRC to facilitate discussion and development with people around the world.

I quite often use my Known site to share links with people over twitter and facebook, but to do the same with folk in IRC I’d have to paste the link by hand, and, well… I’m lazy. So I wrote a plugin!

One particularly handy thing you can do, combined with my command line API tools, is that you have a quick way to post from system services or internet connected (IoT) devices… but I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

Known IRC

The Known IRC plugin adds the ability to syndicate short messages and share links to one or more IRC channels.

Once activated and configured, you will be able to syndicate out to IRC straight from your site.

Limitations

There are a couple of limitations of course…

  • IRC only lets you have one nickname per network (freenode, efnet etc), so if you sit on IRC as well, use a different nickname. Also consider registering this name with nickserv (the plugin supports nickserv passwords)
  • The plugin doesn’t perform a persistent login (for various reasons), therefore it’ll join, post and then leave the channel.

» Visit the project on Github...