Will's blog

It occurred to me that adding a link to category feeds was pretty trivial, so I figured I'd give it a try. It's a bit cluttered to look at (I'm talking about the Categories section on the right hand side there), but ... it's functional.

In case anyone was wondering what my category properties looked like, they're like this:

# category plugin properties
py["category_start"] = ""
py["category_begin"] = ""
py["category_item"] = r'%(indent)s<a href="%(base_url)s/' + \
   r'%(fullcategory_urlencoded)sindex.%(flavour)s">%(category)s</a>' + \
   r' [<a href="%(base_url)s/%(fullcategory_urlencoded)sindex.xml">atom</a>]' + \
   r' (%(count)d)<br />'
py["category_end"] = ""
py["category_finish"] = ""

I figured I'd take some time to share my PyBlosxom setup. As of this writing, I'm running PyBlosxom under Python 2.3.4 on Debian with Apache 1.3.33. I'm running PyBlosxom 1.2 (with some minor adjustments). I have the following plugins:

• booklist - displays a list of books that I'm reading
• comments
• wbgcomment_blacklist - rejects comments that have certain blacklisted terms in them (which has the minor nuissance that no one can talk about Texas Hold'em on here)
• conditionalhttp - returns a 304 if the content hasn't been modified
• filter - filters out CVS and other directories from my blog
• gecko - tells people to use Firefox at the top if they aren't already doing so
• plugininfo - lists the plugins that I'm using
• pycategories - lists the categories in a hierarchy
• pyfilenamemtime - allows me to set the mtime of the blog entry in the file name
• pyinclude - allows me to include files with python scriptlets in the head and foot templates
• pystaticfile - (poorly named) allows "static" content on my site but renders it in the existing template structure
• readmore - allows me to break up my entries into a summary and extended section (I don't think I ever use this)
• rss2renderer - builds the RSS 2.0 feed
• tipsparser - parses tips files
• title - urlencodes the title of a blog entry and tosses it in $urlencodedtitle (which is better for Google Links)
• wbgamazon - builds Amazon links
• wbgarchives - builds archive pages for entire years
• wbgdebug - allows me to look at the debug output of my blog by tossing debug=yes in the querystring
• wbggrep - my incredibly hacked "search" engine
• wbgpager - builds paging navigation when there are more entries to display than I want to display at one time
• wbgrecent - summarizes recent activity on my blog

I write most of my entries using vi or emacs and for the most part I write them in HTML.

There was a time where I wrote blog entries on whatever was in my head to build content and thus test PyBlosxom. Recently, I've been doing development summaries and writing about life changes. I think a good portion of my blog entries talk about how I don't have much free time.

I have no idea who my audience is or what they look for here.

I'm going to take some time to slim down my site and make bits of it easier to use. Then I'll package up the templates I use and make them available for other PyBlosxom users. I'm curious to see how long that takes and how much effort is involved.

A couple of friends pointed out to me my META tag to refresh from /~willg/ to /~willg/blog/ was borked and while it worked fine in Mozilla and derivatives (which are the only browsers I use), it didn't work at all in Internet Explorer. All fixed now though.

For future reference, the "good code" is like this:

   <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; URL=http://bluesock.org/~willg/blog/">

First off, it's now "http://www.bluesock.org/~willg/blog/". I followed Rael's directions and implemented the mod_rewrite adjustments. That worked super. Then it created some mild issues that I'm sorting out now. Namely, I have all kinds of content in different formats: html, shtml, php, and now pyblosxom entries. So I'm going to do a massive normalization of all the content and get rid of the stuff I don't update ever. Getting there.

Anyhow, so my point is that my entire site is now in a state of flux as it gets re-absorbed into more of a blog with a slight amount of static content.