At the end of the year, it's hard to resist making end-of-year lists, so I could hardly resist making a list of all my weblog articles over 2004. In the end, I didn't actually get around to doing it, but since I was patching along nicely this evening, I figured now would be the time to do it.
So. From now on, for any /index.html URL in my website, substitute it by index.index.html to get an index. Nifty, eh?
Internally, it is driven by the index.html template, which can be found here. I added the following to my blosxom.cgi to generate it:
@static_flavours = qw/html rss index.html/;So.. to see the offical "Meilof's homepage" 2004 overview, go here and be amazed...
Posted at 02:24 - [/log] - permanent link
Installed a new Blosxom plugin called readme that allows for a readme text at the beginning of each page. Useful for Meilof's Snackbar Review Guide to get an overview of all reviewed snackbars.
Found another plugin called entries_index as well, stating its purpose as:
Purpose: Preserves original creation timestamp on weblog entries, allowing for editing of entries without altering the original creation time.
Maybe this will eliminate the need for the ugly Perl script I'm using now... I've installed it, and I'm pretty curious whether this will help...
Like I said earlier, I should probably switch to a dynamic log anyway... lots of interesting plugins floating around with me being unable to use them :S
Posted at 02:11 - [/log] - permanent link
I had been thinking it was kind of sheepish just to use the default Blosxom for your own website, but since I'm not that much of a designer and I liked it enough, I left it there. But today I spend some time with it, and this is the result (I saved a screenshot of the old layout here).
Posted at 02:06 - [/log] - permanent link
Today's mass-post does make me realize that static blogging does have its disadvantages. I had some things pending over the last few days, but the fact that you can't just go to a webpage, enter the text, and post directly, made me decide to wait a bit until I had some time for posting (that is, now). I can get some webspace at the FMF though, with PHP, Perl, MySQL and everything, so it'll probably be a good idea to move there.
As a demonstration of this, I wrote most of today's stories a few days on an old Windows 95 box, so I was unable to upload them directly :(
Posted at 18:44 - [/log] - permanent link
It just occured to me why I keep losing the dates of my weblog posts (see here): whenever I made a copy of my
wanadoo directory, the new copy had
the creation date set on the moment of copying rather than the actual creation
date. Seems a bit of a strange behaviour to me. Just spent another half an
hour touch -t'ing my files back to the right date :( but now at
least I know what's going on.
Posted at 20:01 - [/log] - permanent link
Just read this article. Very funny. Personally, I think a Weblog is just as much a personal thing like doing a diary or something like that, and it's just fun to fiddle around with. Today's equivalent of those "look, here's me and my dog" pages people used to have when free homepages first came. Do mostly agree with the author, and realize most of it applies to me, too...
Funny detail: watch the Google-powered ad to the right of the article: "Get your own free blog". Lol.
Posted at 16:05 - [/log] - permanent link
Did some testing with Movable type, which seems to be pretty much the predominant blogging software (no, not all night, I just got back from town and wanted something to post). I can imagine that the fact that all the configuration happens through its WWW configuration interface would be a relief for many people, but I'd argue it isn't that much easier to set up than Blosxom, even if you have to peek into some scary-looking Perl scripts. Compared to the process of logging in and clicking 5 buttons before your blog entry is online, the Blosxom idea of creating a text file and running a command to synchronize with the remote server is really neat.
The familiar default look of Movable type does look really nice though... might try applying it to my blosxom site once... It's kind of spacious, you won't notice if there is very little content due to the whitespace between evertying. Which is quite a contrast when compared to the default Blosxom interface I use, which has a tight interface with barely-readable 8pt characters... Don't know which I like most. Shouldn't try creating my own layout. Ugh!
As a side note, Movable Type does seem to support static blogging which at first I though it didn't. You do have to have a local Apache install to access the web interface from which to post though. Not very practical.
Posted at 03:00 - [/log] - permanent link
My relationship with Blosxom has a tension of changing from one day to another, but today, I like it again. I played around with some plugins, and the plugin system is working very smoothly. New are the breadcrums plugin that displays "You are here" information and the config plugin, which automagically changes the subtitle of specific sections (check my politics section). I wrote a "grep" plugin that can substitute text on-the-fly, but I don't have a clear goal for that yet (I was thinking about smiley substitution, but I figured that that wouldn't work since my font is too small to have smileys in it -- perhaps substituting .. to home.wanadoo.nl/meilof would make sense though...). And... I hacked on the calendar plugin to make it generate old calendars for archives. Neat.
Posted at 14:39 - [/log] - permanent link
Just found out I lost all modification dates of the blogging entries I wrote. Because Blosxom uses these dates to find out on what date a message was posted, this meant all of my posts showed up today. So, I spent the last half an hour restoring them from an older generated version I had lying around... Not sweet.
Note to self: always check modification dates before upload!
Posted at 21:54 - [/log] - permanent link
Tweaking your weblog is fun!
Today, I added a category view for the weblog entries. As you can see on the left, there are a few categories to choose from. Each category even has its odnw RSS feed, so if you're only interested in my programming projects, just subscribe to the projects RSS feed :)
One really fun thing is the Blosxom plugin repository. Lots of great things there. Got the calendar from it, for one.
Though Blosxom does make templates thing pretty easy to modify, you do notice it isn't optimized for static content. If I want to make site-wide changes that are applied to all pages, I can run Blosxom to generate everything, but then the calendar in the January pages becomes a february calendar, which isn't really what you'd want... For now if I want to re-generate I switch the calendar back to January 31, generate the January content, and then switch it back for the February content... And when entering the content, I have to type in the base URL of my page every time I want to insert an image or something....
Anyway, maybe rather than fuzzing I should just fix it; after all, I do have the source code here so I could hack on it. Nah... don't feel like it now...
Posted at 12:34 - [/log] - permanent link