Mon, 05 Nov 2007

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

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

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

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