Mon, 05 Nov 2007

RSS feeds don't quite work

Turns out it does matter that there are these double slashes. Firefox seems to ignore them and display the feeds all the same; Google Reader has a problem and can't subscribe me to such a defective feed.

Another problem: although the blog is now in UTF-8, the feeds aren't. Chinese characters aren't displayed properly in the feeds.

Posted on 05 Nov 2007 at 18:49 in /technology/internet/blosxom. -- Permalink

RSS feeds seem to work

After quite a lot of "trial and error", the RSS feeds for this blog seem to work, too. See bottom of this page, or of any page here.

Strangely, sometimes there are double slashes in the actual link locations. I don't understand why they're there. They don't seem to matter though, clicking on an RSS feed link takes me to the feed alright. I don't understand this either.

It's great that Blosxom provides a separate feed for every category. Also, they're rather easy to get at (so you can add links pointing to them to a page) with the help of some variables.

Posted on 05 Nov 2007 at 18:40 in /technology/internet/blosxom. -- Permalink

UTF - success!

Once again, that was easy. Simply putting a file named "content_type.html" into the Blosxom "data folder" on my server did the trick - this file makes sure that browsers recognise the character encoding as UTF-8. It contains just one line: "text/html; charset=UTF-8". A look at the FAQ and I got all the info I needed. 太好了！

Posted on 05 Nov 2007 at 18:18 in /technology/internet/blosxom. -- Permalink

Aligning images with CSS

This is a very helpful page (part of SELFHTML).

Posted on 05 Nov 2007 at 17:26 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Qingdao MTI International School

Nothing to do with the MTI ... A good place nevertheless!

Posted on 05 Nov 2007 at 16:50 in /china/education. -- Permalink

Serendipity

Yes, maybe I accidentally discovered something fortunate; but that's not what I'm talking about. What I mean is the content management system and blogging software named Serendipity (see the Wikipedia entry).

This just might be something for the remaining 3 Amity websites which haven't yet been redone - or, indeed, created: ANL, ANS and, "coming soon", the Hong Kong Chinese website (in traditional characters).

Other options are Plone (maybe too sophisticated?), Mambo and, alas, a commercial product.

Posted on 05 Nov 2007 at 16:46 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Timestamps

Well, that was easy. There's the timestamp plugin - you download, unzip and put it into your plugins directory. This gives you access to quite a few variables, which you can then use e.g. in your "story" flavour file.

Posted on 05 Nov 2007 at 14:31 in /technology/internet/blosxom. -- Permalink

Time zones

Interesting. There's a Blosxom plugin which lets timestamps use a different timezone than the server. Configuring it for Hong Kong Time gave me a chance to learn a few things about time zones and POSIX (standards for UNIX systems).

So it seems our time zone here should be given as "HKT-8" because "HKT" is often used for "Hong Kong Time" and we're 8 hours ahead of GMT/UTC (Greenwich Meantime/Coordinated Universal Time).

Next step: how can I make sure that Blosxom actually displays timestamps?

Posted on 05 Nov 2007 at 14:07 in /technology. -- Permalink

Flavours and a calendar!

Well, in the meantime I found out how to use "flavours" in order to manipulate the look of a Blosxom blog.

Also, I found a plugin which creates a nice calendar (clicking on a day in the calendar takes visitors to the articles posted that day) and learned how to integrate it into the blog (you just need to put a line of code into one of your flavour files).

Once you've learned which files should go to which directories, it's really not that difficult anymore. And the combination of "lightweight" and "feature-packed" (to quote from the Blosxom homepage at Sourcefourge) is charming indeed. Simple as dirt and flexible as water!

Posted on 05 Nov 2007 at 13:57 in /technology/internet/blosxom. -- Permalink

Fighting - cont'd ...

Quite a lot of the links to plugins from Blosxom's Sourceforge page are dead. Even though you can still find such plugins somewhere on the internet, it's not easy to get them to work.

For example, I just can't get Blosxom to encode its posts in UTF - which I need in order to display Chinese characters. With the relevant plugin, Blosxom returns a 500 page ("a server hiccup").

On the other hand, the "blox" plugin does a good job of inserting "paragraph" tags so I don't have to type them anymore. That's nice.

All in all, this whole Blosxom thing doesn't seem to be all that well maintained.

Posted on 05 Nov 2007 at 13:53 in /technology/internet/blosxom. -- Permalink

Fighting with Blosxom

Blosxom, described by its makers as "the zen of blogging", has a certain charme because it is so sparse.

Getting it to work properly, however, is far from easy - even though the documentation isn't all that bad.

Posted on 05 Nov 2007 at 13:46 in /technology/internet/blosxom. -- Permalink

Sunday shopping

Once you forget your qualms about breaking the 4th (others would say the 3rd) commandment, and about the exploitation of shop assistants, and about unfair competition between chain stores and family-owned businesses, it's actually rather nice to be able to shop at leisure on a Sunday. Be a consumer and feel good: Hong Kong makes this very easy.

Today we spent all the cash we had - and that was after emptying our HK$ accounts - on a CD, a cinnamon roll, a mug of coffee, a bottle of wine and 3 shirts. Literally all our dollars; we wouldn't even have had enough money to take a bus back home (but walking in the sunshine was fine). True, the shirts are nice and one of them is rather special ... There's still plenty of money in the bank - but in our euro account, and for some reason (I guess there's a reason!) you can't convert euros into dollars using an ATM, you need to do that on the internet. We should have taken a computer.

Or just enough cash.

Posted on 05 Nov 2007 at 13:46 in /life. -- Permalink

Readings for 3 November

我的神！我的神！你为什么离弃我？ 我呼求，你不应允。

Not what you would like to see on your birthday ... Sometimes it’s good to have a New Testament passage with a different tendency from the one of the Old Testament one (Psalm 22) in the Moravian Watchwords for a given day:

出于信心的祈祷，可以使病人康复，主必叫他起来；他若犯了罪，也必蒙赦免。

Moreover, in this case the New Testament verse happens to be from James (5:15), one of my favourite books.

生词表 - List of new words:

• 离弃 li2qi4 abandon v.
• 呼 hu1 call, cry, shout v.
• 求 qiu2 seek, demand v.
• 应 ying4 answer v.
• 允 yun3 allow, comply v.

呼求 and 应允 - beautiful parallelism!

Posted on 05 Nov 2007 at 13:46 in /life. -- Permalink

Gnome Blog, Drivel, Deepest Sender

Gnome Blog still seems nice - works well, has a small "footprint", does what it's supposed to do and nothing else. Well, that's almost true: there are two things it should do but doesn't. First, it doesn't support editing (or deleting) older entries. (I could live with that.) Second, it doesn't support categories, so all entries posted using Gnome Blog get filed under "Uncategorized" and I have to use a browser in order to categorise them properly. Quite a pain! It seems to me that not using a browser is the whole point of using a blogging client.

Which is why I've tried Drivel. It has those two features, so that's fine. But how about multiple categories? If I want to file an entry under more than one category, it seems I still have to use a browser, log onto my blog and edit the relevant post. How much of an improvement over Gnome Blog is that, I wonder?

Moreover, when you edit a previous entry, the category setting will by default go back to "None" (which WordPress interprets as "Uncategorized") - something you have to remember every time you edit a post. That's stupid. Not to mention the name "Drivel", which is as repulsive as the photo which is displayed before you have logged on.

Deepest Sender, an add-on for Firefox, is the best client I've tried so far. It has a nice interface, which looks similar to the original WordPress "Write" and "Manage" pages, and yes! it has all the features I want. (Multiple categories don't work, however, when you edit a previous post! Grumble ...) Deepest Sender even lets you look at the HTML source of your entries.

OK, it's not a stand-alone blogging client. However, since it feels like one as long as Firefox is running (and on my computers it's running basically all the time), I'm willing to put up with that. So the only real drawback that I see is its weak support for images: apparently you have to upload a picture to your blog manually and then to type the path to it into a window in Deepest Sender. This is not good enough! But since I hardly ever post pictures ...

Posted on 05 Nov 2007 at 13:45 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink