Slashcode

An Anonymous Slash Admin asks: "I finally have a running slashsite and am trying to customize it. Is there a simple way to query the DB for recent logins? I would like my main page to display something like:

XX users logged in within the past hour.
XX users logged in within the past 24 hours.

Would it also be possible to look at the number of IP's that Anon. users come in from to get a count of unique readers in the past hour and day? I've searched and have not found a plugin that will do this. Any advice on where to start would be appreciated!"

tf23 submits this nice little tidbit: "O'Reilly has an article up called "Introducing LAMP Tuning Techniques. The article, while brief, discusses quite a bit of the software that Slash uses. If you've never looked into "tuning" apache, or even MySQL, this could be a good read for you."

Feather^2 writes: "Here is my patch to make Slashcode work under Apache 2+mod_perl 1.99. Lots and lots of little changes were neccessary, mostly focusing on the differenecs between mod_perl v1 and mod_perl v2 module configuration, environmnet variables, and POST data. The Hempology 101 Website has been running for over two months on this code with no problems, so I thought it was time to share it with the world. :)" Please note that Apache2+mod_perl is still not quite ready for prime_time, but if you are interested in playing around with the combination, I'm sure others would be interested in hearing your experiences.

subdomain-less asks: "Hi, I run this site, and want to run Slash in www.dte.ua.pt/forum, since I have no control of DNS to creat www.forum.dte.ua.pt. I can't see a way in slash install procedure to acomplish this. I've tried to do:

Alias /forum /usr/local/slash/...

However that doesn't seem to work. Any ideas?" There is a way to make it work, but it's not an easy procedure. First off, you'll have to change a few variables, once your slash site is installed: absolutedir, basedir, imagedir, rdfimg, and rootdir. Secondly there may be problems in some of the handlers, most notably Slash::Apache::ImageHandler, Slash::Apache::User::userdir_handler, and Slash::Apache::User::handler. A patch to fix these problems may be forthcoming, but it might take a while.

latin-1 asks: "Hi, I run a Portuguese Slash site. So far, I have been unable to get Portuguese characters, like '&aacute', 'õ', right in the site. I'm using charset ISO-8859-1 in Slash. When I submit a story with words with Portuguese characters, they get mangled. This shouldn't be happening, especially since MySQL is Latin-1. If I go to MySQL and replaced the mangled characters with the right ones, then they appear correctly in the site. It seems that somehow, something is converting the Portuguese characters to mangled ones before they enter in MySQL. What can it be and how to solve this problem? You can go to the site and post anonymously to test. Any help would be much appreciated. I'm running Red Hat 9 and Slash 2.2.6. Thank you for your time and patience." First off, making sure you are using the right input and output character encodings is important. For those of you with working Slash sites with non-English characters, what did you have to do to get things to display and input properly, without character mangling? Have you been finding that, even with the right encodings, Slash is still mangling your characters? If so, what experiences have you had?