Blogging

We all love pub quizzes and like TV quiz shows. I think it’s partly because we are curious to see whether we can answer the questions and sometimes, to occasionally, laugh at some of the bizarre answers offered by contestants under time pressure. One of my favourites recently was a lady who was asked:- ‘Hydrocarbons are made up of carbon and which other element ?’ ‘Carbon dioxide’ I loved this answer because she replied, in part, with ‘Carbon’ which would have meant that hydrocarbons comprised of carbon, and well, more carbon. Then she added two atoms of oxygen for good measure. ...

7:54am on a quiet Monday morning. Quiet because it’s New Year’s Eve. I have just put £15 into a hire car prior to returning the vehicle. There’s just one gentleman is in front of me paying. He has a fuel card so he’s asked for his registration. He can’t remember this so looks out to the forecourt to check. Maybe this is a hire car too although that seems unlikely as it’s an ancient, brown, battered Volvo estate. No problem. Then he’s asked for his mileage which he doesn’t know. This is optional so no problem. ...

It all started innocuously enough with this post from Alex Shroeder https://octodon.social/@kensanata/101052266709264418 Writing tools. Emacs Wiki What about you? I spontaneously replied. Emacs Orgmode Nikola This reminded me that since, I had recently migrated my desktop from Arch Linux to Fedora 29, I needed to reinstall Nikola and check that the blog I never use still could be built successfully. Oh - how exciting. Nikola has recently released version [8.0.1] Nikola-8 and I was on the previous version - 7.8.15. I quickly created a Python 3 virtual environment and installed Nikola. ...

This is the famous ‘Hello world’ program written in Python in colour using Markdown. #!/usr/bin/env python import sys def hello(name='world'): greeting = "hello " + name print(greeting) if __name__ == "__main__": hello(*sys.argv[1:]) This took me a long time to get working.

Although hosting on GitHub pages is an excellent option, I decided to move this blog to Amazon S3, mainly because I have used S3 before. Also GitHub pages only supports a limited set of Jekyll plugins and I wanted more flexibility to add any plugin and (potentially) run a different version of Jekyll. I also took the opportunity to switch the theme to the rather minimalistic but stylish Poole and installed the useful s3website utility to automatically synchronise the static site to Amazon S3. As you are charged for upload/download traffic, an intelligent sync process (rather than uploading everything) for deployment is important. ...

Welcome…to the atrocity exhibition. Fittingly, this site is powered by Jekyll and Github pages, but the precise details will probably take a series of 1,739 posts.

‘Is she a werewolf ? ‘No’. ‘Does she have the ability to spontaneously transform into a fierce animal ?’ ‘No’. ‘Is she a robot ?’ ‘No’. ‘Is she a very early version of a robot that is running version 1.0.1 (alpha) of the software that meant she lost to that human-robot hybrid ?’ ‘No’ ‘Is she a normal human but just set 200 years in a post-apocalyptic world where water, fuel and sunlight are at a premium ?’ ...

Diamond Geezer recently posted his annual analysis of how many blogrolls he appears in. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the number is steadily declining and he finds it harder to find new blogs to add to his list. I thought it might be interesting to look at the blogging platforms used by the 98 blogs listed. Here are the results: Blogger 60 WordPress.com 11 WordPress.org 11 Typepad 4 MovableType 3 Livejournal 2 Canalblog 1 Drupal 1 ExpressionEngine 1 Nucleus CMS 1 Serendipity 1 Guardian (journo) 1 Custom 1 The dominance of Blogger/Blogspot didn’t surprise me that much. I have noticed before that it’s very popular amongst UK bloggers; particularly veteran bloggers who maybe had less choice available that the plethora of options available today. ...

My site has 966 posts and 70 categories. By default, Octopress re-generates the entire site - every single post, all the category pages, the archive pages On my Acer Aspire One (Intel Atom 1.66GHz) netbook, the regeneration takes around 10 minutes. There are a couple of options that can significantly reduce this time and make the write/preview/edit iterative process more tolerable. Firstly, you can use ‘rake isolate’ to move all other posts into a ‘stash’ directory and simply process the newly created post. ...

The last ever migration of this blog is now complete. This blog is now powered by Octopress and is a statically generated site hosted on Amazon S3. All posts have been migrated from HTML to Markdown and every single permalink (all 954 of them) have been painstakingly checked, rationalised and consolidated. To achieve this, I simply generated a sitemap of the Drupal site and compared this with a sitemap for a test site using Octopress after the data migration. ...