Things I still need to install and test before I decide on Pyblosxom as my blogging platform:

• comments and captchas
• the readmore plugin (because my entries are often long)

There's also a very long list of things I'd like to do if I decide on Pyblosxom:

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Successfully got one flavor installed and tweaked. A flavor (or "flavour" if you're British) is a skin for your blog. There's a default flavor, but you can also change the flavor you see by passing some variable to the cgi script. I forget what it is.

Anyway, I think the autumn flavor is really awesome. I think the footer file is constraining the way the calendar and tag cloud look. I'll have to dink around with other flavors and see what they do differently. But it's really pretty! I took a screenshot, just in case I change the flavor later:

/me needs sleep.

I'm currently setting up my remote git repository for my blog. I have to setup a post-update script, so that changes to the remote repo will be reflected in the local checkout of my blog (which is on the same server, coincidentally). It's a bit of a hack, but PyBlosxom needs the actual files around somewhere on the server.

Here's my post-update script (where $blog is the directory of your local repository):

#!/bin/sh

cd $blog
unset GIT_DIR
git-fetch origin
git-reset --hard origin/master

Still trying to get the tagging plugin to work. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong. The plugin is in my plugin directory (renamed to tags-sorted.py instead of tags-sorted.txt). I've set the tags URL to--oops, there's the problem, I needed a trailing slash at the end of the URL. Let's reload and see if that's really the problem...

Nope. I needed to add $tags to my html flavor's story.flav file. I'm still not seeing any entries in the tags folders that I created; I'm not sure what's up with that. I should probably get a better html flavor before I attempt to add a tag cloud.

Edit: I fixed it! I didn't understand what tag_url was supposed to be. A lot of people have Apache mod_rewrite for their blog urls, and they assume that everyone else does too. For a beginning install, tag_url should be the URL for the pyblosxom cgi script, followed by /tags/. E.g. http://minilop.net/cgi-bin/pyblosxom.cgi/tags/

Oh, and you need to add two variables to your config.py or sometimes looking up a tag will fail:

py['ignore_tags'] = []
py['relatedstories_header'] = ""

What a mess! None of it is documented in the plugin file.

My blog entries are now under revision control with git. This is becoming most civilized.

This is my second post with PyBlosxom, and I'm using the markdown plugin. Here's some markdown formated stuff:

My proposed garden layout (which has since undergone a couple revisions):

I just installed Pyblosxom on Jamey's Debian server, and now I'm posting my installation notes on my new Pyblosxom blog!

Unfortunately, the Debian package for Pyblosxom has been orphaned. The package version is 1.3.2, and the current Pyblosxom version is 1.4.3. Someone submitted a bug report about the lack of updates, and included a link to a package they'd updated to 1.4.2. This was before the package was orphaned, so no one could sponsor an upload of the new package. I grabbed the 1.4.2 .deb file and installed it with dpkg -i. Works great so far.

There are two installation pages on the Pyblosxom website that I found relevant: the Debian install instructions, and the CGI install instructions.

The Debian instructions are very short, and it didn't mention that the Debian package installs flavours in /usr/share/python-support/pyblosxom/Pyblosxom/flavours. I copied those files to my homedir so that I could modify the HTML flavor and change the look of my blog.

The CGI instructions didn't mention that flavourdir is a string, not a list of strings. So it can only be one directory, not multiple directories. If you wanted to keep the default Debian flavour directory, you would put this line in your /etc/pyblosxom/config.py:

py["flavourdir"] = "/usr/share/python-support/pyblosxom/Pyblosxom/flavours"

My blog URL is currently at http://minilop.net/cgi-bin/pyblosxom.cgi The installation instructions talk about using Apache mod_rewrite to change your blog URL to something more sane, but you really don't need Apache. Jamey's server runs LightTPD, and he's said you can do similar URL redirections with it.

Several times during the install, I had to check for Pyblosxom error messages in /var/log/lighttpd/error.log.

This is my first post with PyBlosxom. The date for this post is part of the filename, and the pyfilenamemtime plugin will make PyBlosxom use that date for displaying the entry, rather than the file timestamp.

I've been slightly side-tracked from my quest to host my own blog by the search for a good calendar and todo list application. It is still sort of relevant, because I'd like to embed my calendar in my blog. It's really useful to point family members to a web calendar and say, "You pick a free night for us to have dinner."

My current setup is just not working. I've been keeping my todo list and events in a plain text file in a git repository. I usually only check the file when I'm adding a new task or event. This means I'm suddenly faced with the mountain of undone tasks during a (usually) stressful moment. It's no wonder I've slowly started avoiding looking at that file at all. I need something pretty that I can bear to look at every morning.

I'd like to have a nice GUI to display my calendar and todo list, and a way to do offline edits for both. A way to publish my calendar on the web and keep some events private is a must.

I've found a partial solution with Google Calendar + Sunbird + GCalDaemon + Remember the Milk. As of today, I can view and edit my Google Calendar with Sunbird, and I can view my Remember the Milk (RTM) todo lists in Sunbird. The only thing lacking is the support to edit my RTM todo lists in Sunbird, both online and offline.

Screenshots of the integrated goodness:

Having separate work and personal todo lists is wonderful because I can hide the tasks by unclicking the RTM calendar that they're associated with. Now I won't think about putting out the garbage when I really should be figuring out how to use the signing-party package to sign Matthew Wilcox and James Perkins' GPG keys.

The public side of my Google Calendar can be found via html here or via ical here. Please don't stalk me.

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My big presentation went well yesterday. I presented to all the managers in my group and Imad. (Imad runs the Open Source Technology Center (OTC) and is my manager's manager's boss.) My manager said that he didn't think anyone was bored, and it was the right level of technical detail. Go me! It was my first real exposure since I joined OTC in August. Now it's over, and I can relax and get back to hacking.

Right now I'm sitting in the Tao of Tea, drinking wonderful organic tea and hacking. We really need to have a Linux Coffee Shop Day again.

I got sexy new reading glasses today. For the past couple of weeks, I've developed headaches after staring at my computer all day. I feel fine today, and I can tell that my eyes aren't straining to focus. As an added bonus, I can shrink the fonts on all my applications. Yay for more code per square inch!

I bought a new bike. :D I'm so excited because it's my first new bike in 8 years. My previous new bike was a Target-special that my parents bought when I got too tall for the bike that had training wheels. My new bike is a Jamis Coda, which is a hybrid with 24-speeds, a steel frame, quick releases on the tires, and holes in the frame for a front rack, back rack, and fenders. (Wow, I just rattled that off the top of my head. I'm becoming such a bike geek.)

My new bike should be great for commuting back and forth, and ok for biking trips this summer. I want to do a weekend trip to down the Columbia River Gorge, and a week-long trip down the Oregon Coast. I also want to participate in pedalpalooza this June and go on more bike rides with the Portland bike groups. Deepak wants to do a bike ride down to a penguin themed bar somewhere south. Should be fun!