Some Assembly Required » Blog

Converted Posts

Ian — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 02:46:07 +0000

I think I got all the old posts converted to using Markdown. Since this blog started with Textpattern which uses Textile, most of the posts were in that format. Typo was smart enough to handle posts in different markup formats and switch formats to Markdown a few months ago. WordPress is not smart enough to handle posts in different formats and the Textile ones were broken when rendered in Markdown.

I also fixed up all of the images. Some of the old ones were in Photostack install which had gotten moved and broken a while ago. I am going to have to figure out a more permanent solution to the location of images.

WordPress Themes

Ian — Sun, 07 Jan 2007 23:40:01 +0000

Since switching to WordPress, I have been playing around with WordPress themes. I am looking for a minimalist style with black text on a white background. I prefer variable-width two-column themes while themes seem to be fixed-width. I am not a big fan of top navigation bars or header images.

ScribbishWP is a port of a Typo theme. It uses the hAtom microformat and is supposed to be easy to customize. It is a fixed-width theme and under Typo I had to tweak it to be wide enoguh to display images properly. Unfortunately, it doesn’t support some newer features like Sidebar Widgets.
Sandbox is a minimalist theme which is meant to be easy to be styled. It also has support for some newer features. I am going to play around and see if I can style it into something I like.
K2 is the followup to Kubrick, the default WordPress theme. It has lots of advanced AJAXy features. It is supposed to be easy to customize and style. There seem to be lots of variants.
Cutline is a nice, clean, two-column theme.
Regulus is two-column customizable theme. A little busy for my taste.

Converted to WordPress

Ian — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 22:56:01 +0000

I got tired of the issues with running Typo on Textdrive and converted this blog to WordPress. The main problem is that the Rails process was being killed by the server for using too much memory. I tried various tricks to reduce the memory usage or restart the process when it disappeared and none of them helped. It didn’t help that the web site has been down for a while. I liked Typo in general, I liked that it was written in Ruby and was easy to develop for, and I was hopeful that development would pick up.

I don’t like that WordPress is written in PHP. But it sure made it easy to get installed. I used Stuart Johnston’s migration script to convert the posts. The number of plugins and themes is the biggest advantage to WordPress. I used the PHP Markdown to write posts in Markdown. I am using the ScribbishWP theme which is a port of the Scribbish Typo theme which I played around with.

I think I maintained all the permalinks so old links should keep working. The older posts are in Textile and aren’t being rendered correctly. All the images and uploads should be working. I am keeping the old blog available at http://znark.com/typo/ for now.

Trackback Spam

Ian — Wed, 12 Jul 2006 03:29:18 +0000

I foolishly had left trackbacks on by default on this blog. I just noticed that some of the articles had hundreds of trackbacks on them. I doubt this blog is that popular. I think I would have noticed if I got on slashdot. They all looked like link spam.

Unfortunately, Typo does not have any mechanism for mass deleting trackbacks. I had to go into the database and delete all of them. I ended up deleting 2045 trackbacks on only 45 articles. While I was at it, I changed all of the articles to not allow pings.

Pledge

Ian — Sun, 11 Jun 2006 00:21:20 +0000

I really need to post more often to this thing. In the last month, I went to Hawaii, Astoria, and took lots of pictures. My new resolution is to post something every day. Most of them will be retrospective, links to elsewhere, computer-releated, and boring.

Got Typo Working

Ian — Sun, 11 Dec 2005 21:13:00 +0000

I got Typo working as I want it. The solution was adding a line to config/environment.rb to tell it to make all the links relative. I didn’t need the new strip-request-uri parameter for lighttpd.

ActionController::AbstractRequest.relative_url_root = "/blog"

Then I setup up the proxying. This was done through webmin but the directives produced were:

ProxyPass /blog http://znark.com:8090/blog
ProxyPassReverse /blog http://znark.com:8090/blog

Switching to Typo

Ian — Thu, 24 Nov 2005 18:20:00 +0000

I am switching the blog to Typo, blog software written in Ruby, using the Rails framework.

The hard part is getting the software to run fast and run where I want it http://znark.com/blog/. FastCGI and Apache don’t seem to work with my hosting company. So I could run it through CGI which means the each page loads slowly as it compiles tons of Ruby libraries.

A popular solution at TextDrive is to run a personal Lighttpd web server process on an assigned port. Then, Apache can proxy to lighttpd so nobody has to remember to go to http://blog.znark.com:8090/.

However, I haven’t figured out how to get typo to go in a subdirectory while running under a subdirectory. Lighttpd doesn’t yet have all the rewrite functionality needed. Until I get this figured out, the blog may be broken or not have any style.