“Site News” has been in a stasis, if not a coma, since I migrated from my former CMS platform to TextPattern. As this proprietary and deprecated function was no longer applicable beyond a few homebrew extensions and updates beneath the hood, I have not used it.

However, with the upgrade to TXP 4.0.8, my ‘old redirect links’ that were automatically generated under Rollator have ceased to work properly; I’ve retooled the redirect parser to contend with this, and it functions as designed once again.

For those of you who are wondering about those ‘silly long garbage link urls’ above, it is simply a fully-qualified URI as a base64 hash with padding removed; in 2003 it was pretty spiffy – after all, this would allow you to link to other sites without losing PR in Google (remember, rel=‘nofollow’ did not yet exist – that was introduced in 2005)!

For the few interested in Rollator:

That was my homebrew CMS which I started work on late in 2001 and built upon through 2004ish – until eventually abandoning it because it had outgrown it’s usefulness in my mind, and I didn’t feel like maintaining a rather obnoxious code base or rewriting it – I decided that the world did not need yet another CMS.

However, in 2002 it touted RSS 0.9 and 2.0 feeds, Dynamic page generation (with content caching to use as few SQL calls as possible – it took 3 to build the final page if you had comments and QuickURLs enabled, and would generate a cached/rendered page every update so it was nearly as fast as static HTML content), A multiple-user administrative interface, redirect and URL masking, a simple ‘comment on this entry’ display/add subsystem, music-listening-to-now dynamic updates, the ability to make bookmarklets of sites you find interesting (which I called QuickURLs at the time), image/content upload and automatic linking, full SHA160 and GPG-protected dynamic checksumming (which was very CPU heavy, but allowed you to ensure that the content offered was that which you initially provided – rather, that it hasn’t been tampered with), XHTML 1.0 Strict templating (also HTML 4.01 transitional) – with a CSS based ‘format for printer’ display/print option for content, an archive browse, a full search system, a dynamic calendar which allowed you to see dates with entries and choose them for perusal, and very basic external function call-ability for importing/utilizing other code inline. You can see the very last stages of its’ development, if you really want to.