Bag of Spoons

New comments system

I've been using the standard Pyblosxom comment plug-in for a while. It works, but has limited options. The other day I saw that my friend Wulf has started using the Disqus comments service. This allows visitors to either sign in with various types of identity or to leave anonymous comments. You can track you comments on any site using the service.

A quick Google revealed that someone had already implemented a Pyblosxom plug-in for Disqus. This was very easy to install and seems to work. I want to get a few things tidied up such as showing the number of comments on each entry. I also want to tidy the general layout of the site. The long archive list is untidy. Any suggestions? I'm not much of a web designer.

Dead air

I'm not finding the time to blog much lately. There's a couple of things I want to write up, but it generally requires a spare hour to put anything together, especially if I want to include lots of links. The main one will be a history of video games I've played. I'm not a big gamer, but I go back a long way. I keep thinking of more.

Part of the problem is that I have to hack together a text file and upload it each time. Other blogging platforms make it easier, but I still like Pyblosxom.

So stay tuned. Meanwhile, here's something to offend all religions.

Updating the reading list

I've just caught up on logging what I have been reading recently. I need to check if I have omitted any books. The list is here or you can see the latest ones in the sidebar. I'm using an add-on for Pyblosxom that requires entering the details in a slightly contrived style. It uses more comment and category fields than I really need, but I haven't tried to change that as yet.

I also added in some earlier books from the previous add-on that used a slightly different file format. I probably could have scripted something to do that, but it took less time to do it manually. I know I lose geek points for that.

Lacking Time To Compose Updates

I have a number of things that I want to blog, but have been short of time. Last week I was skiing in France. Had a lot of fun. I may blog more about that. I've almost finished another book that I need to review. Then last night I was at HertsLUG where Malc gave a good talk on the issues with OOXML. I also had a chance to play with an Asus EEE there. I want one.

I am more active on my Twitter account as that is easy to update from web or via IM, but only handles short messages. For the blog I have to compose a post in an editor and FTP it. I like to take the time to think about what I want to say, but sometimes end up rushing it. So if you want the latest news follow me on Twitter. Or just take the RSS feed here for the infrequent posts. Comment if you want to respond publicly.

Oops, too many http in a link there. I'm writing this in nano via ssh.

Rewriting the URL

I've wanted for ages to make the URLs on this site simpler. This can be done using Apache's mod_rewrite, but I wasn't sure if that was installed here. I just found out it was and have created a rule so that everything hangs off bagofspoons.net/blog. This may have caused a lot of old posts to reappear on the RSS feed. Sorry for any inconvenience.

A new start

It has been my intention for a while to tidy up my site a bit. One thing I wanted was to have some content at the top level of my domain, i.e. bagofspoons.net. Well now there is something there. It will act as my actual homepage that says something about me. It will also hold some less visible data for use by various semantic services. So have a look and let me know what needs improving.

It was pointed out to me this week that some of my internal links do not work, particularly when you view a post on its own page. I tried using relative links, but that obviously has issues. I may not update those posts as Pyblosxom will consider them to be new if I do, but I will be more careful in future.

Eureka

I just figured out why my bookreview plug-in was failing when I clicked on a book. It was expecting the egrep command to be a different place to where it lives on this server. I edited the code and it works now. I'm still working out what details to include in my reviews and how to layout the pages, but I've added my latest couple of reads.

More toys

I've been trying out some more plug-ins for my Pyblosxom site.

Book Review is very similar to the Book List one I had before. It also uses a text file to store all the text, but has some extra fields and can generate a page for each book with the link using the ISBM. Unfortunately the latter is not working for some reason. I'm looking into it.
There's a simple one that gives links to all the other pages. That's something I didn't consider until I cut the number of items on the front page.
Plugin-info just lists what I have installed. It could be useful for checking versions.
Recent could be the most useful. It lists recent items, including comments. I don't get many comments and there's a problem that stops me getting email notifications when a new one is added. The first time I used this I saw I had a couple of comments. Appropriately enough they were on the subject of comments.

One thing I still want to do is to get the site URLs rewritten to something shorter. The main page should really just be at www.bagofspoons.net. I understand this means some set-up in Apache that I need to work out. There's other things to sort out when I find time.

Fresh Py

Over the weekend I've done an overdue update on my site. I was a few revisions behind with PyBlosxom. This version doesn't offer any radical changes, but is supposed to fix some bugs. I've taken the opportunity to reorganise the directory structure to make future upgrades simpler.

I'm also playing with some plug-ins. I've had comments for a while, but only just set them up to email me updates recently. I'm not fully convinced that always works. I've also finally added one for static pages, i.e. pages that are not tied to a date. I intend to use these for things like saying something about myself and things I want to be always easily accessible. I've started with transferring a lot of the content from the right-hand side to a page linked from the top right. I'll tidy that up later. This should resolve an issue a friend was having in tracking links to his site. He was finding hundreds from here as my friends list appeared everywhere.

I still intend to generate my About page from my FOAF file when I find the time. I've seen some other places doing this, so I may be able to copy their code.

Big thanks to Will for his help in getting my static page working. He wrote the plug-in and is the main PyBlosxom man. We chatted on IRC to sort it out. I love the fact that you can have direct access to developers on free software. We found we had a common love of Philip Glass and I suggested he check out Steve Reich.

Considering a change

I may have mentioned this before, but much as I like the simplicity of Pyblosxom, I sometimes wish for a blog system that made it easier to post and to change aspects of my site. For instance, I'm writing this post in a text editor and will then have to FTP it to the server. If I've missed out a closing tag or something I'll have to repeat the process.

One reason for using Pyblosxom was that I wanted to play with Python and I thought that I might write some code for my site, but that just hasn't happened. The software has been developed further, but I'm a little behind on versions. Someone has even written a new web front end, but that still may not be enough to keep me.

A few friends have been using Wordpress. Even though I'm not mad on it using PHP and MySQL, I appreciate that it will give me much more flexibility and make it very easy to change things. There seems to be a good variety of plug-ins for cool things like OpenID that I want to play with. Bigpresh set me up a site to play with on his server and I'm impressed.

So unless my fanbase (which may exceed that of Flight of the Conchords) objects I plan to move over to Wordpress soon. I may well leave the Pyblosxom site here to avoid breaking anyone's links.