AlphaBlog

Silly stuff! The new NB template is nicer than the old. The inset paragraphs are highlighted now, I like the look.

Found typos in the main_index template, replaced $ with & resulting in no image! Fixed now. Happy.

I went ahead today and updated NB to version 3.1. It was more of a challenge than I thought it would be. For one, the instructions suggest that you make a new weblog directory and copy all the default files over to the new directory, then copy your old data files over to the new directory. Well, it would be easier to do the opposite, especially if you have lots of modifications to templates and such. I don't have that many, but I still had to remake all of them using the newer templates. Ran into the problem of copying the default/ over to the new directory deposits it as default rather than its contents. That was an idiot maneuver however, I have figured out how to properly copy the files over to the new weblog directory.

cp -R nanoblogger-3.1/default/* newblog_directory

Works like a charm. That should have been obvious.

The real problem was that sitecopy did not want to update the website properly. I'm unsure why. Looks like I kept the default/ folder in the old alphablog local copy after I managed to correctly move all the default contents to the blog folder. When originally setting up sitecopy, I told it via --catchup that the local copy mirrored the server copy. I had forgotten that the default/ folder existed locally. So, when I went to update and didn't find default/ on the server to delete it, it got upset and didn't work properly. I just deleted everything on the server and ran

sitecopy --init alphablog
sitecopy --update alphablog

Worked like a charm and was still very fast to upload all the files. Now that I look at it more carefully, I may have been able to just run in fetch mode to update the local copy for real. Not sure. Next time.

This box continues to email me status updates. Seems odd to me, the unix on the macs never do that. Root hardly ever has mail on them. Anyway, aside from noticing that /var is getting more full, the emails have a return to sender, address not valid listing in my emailer (Mailsmith). I don't understand how the domain names work quite yet, I'd like to register other subnames to go along with the main name, but I'm not sure I can. When I originally installed OBSD I just left the domainname as my.domain. This is clearly not valid. So, in sendmail I changed it to lizzy.xochitlfilms.org, but this resolves to my.domain, which is not valid. I have now figured out how to change domainname and have done so. I'm awaiting the next email to see what happens. Hope all is well with the most recent change.

On a side note, found a great little program called gphoto to obtain images from digital cameras on unix systems. Very nice command-line interface and very easy to use. I'd love to try it out more on this system, but there is little need with the G4 and iPhoto just next door. Maybe later.

Post-call today after a longer than normal shift. After the dog walk I was too tired to do any real work. I've been looking into using Emacs for more, since if I can integrate more work into one application, it would be much easier. But neither emacs nor vim are particularly straightforward to use, so I have hesitated several times before on further exploration. Last night, during some down time, but not enough to sleep, I searched out more info on using Vi. I think it is manageable, at least when OBSD drops me into it by mistake I can maybe edit the file and easily quit now.

I started a simple emacs wiki on the powerbook in an effort to keep track of projects and how much time I spend on each project. I worked way too much these last few months, but I didn't do a good job of tracking how much time on each project. At this point it seems wise to do so---I have to prove my time spent on projects and need to estimate how much percent effort goes into each project. The problem I am having with emacs wiki is that each time I tell it to update the pages, it creates another page with the same name, but a further .html in the file name. Not sure why. The documentation for emacs is better than Vi, though I'm having trouble with this particular point. I've found MoinMoinWiki and it looks very happy. I may give this a try very soon to compare to emacs wiki.

Need to try the NB upgrade soon. Not brave enough just yet.

Wow! Sitecopy rocks! About a billion times faster than mounting the .Mac iDisk through the finder on the macs. Sitecopy does an absolutely wonderful job of uploading all the modified files very quickly. I will try to incoporate this into the PUBLISH command for nanoblogger, though I think that it is actually fewer keystrokes to tell sitecopy to run directly than it is to run the publish command in NB.

Setting up sitecopy with the .Mac iDisk was not as straightforward as I thought it should be. I'm certain that if I understood better what was happening on either end, I would have realized the mistake. Anyway, the only site on the WWW that I found helpful was in Japanese. I'll summarize the necessary settings below:

site alphablog
server idisk.mac.com
protocol webdav
username xochitl
password pass
local fullpath/local/dir/
remote /idiskusername/Sites/alphablog

That's it! Fantastic little program. Now to get it working on the mac!

Up and running? Not sure about that just yet. I have installed sitecopy to help maintain the remote AlphaBlog site. I was using cadaver to upload files, but it just took too long and it was too much work attempting to ensure that all updated files that needed to be, were uploaded to the remote server. Cadaver is a great program. Works much better than the mount_webdav command in Mac OS X. I went ahead and installed Cadaver on the Mac before I found sitecopy. I'm uncertain that it will work as I have it presently configured, but here we go!

There is another site that documents how to use the picture.sh plug-in, very well actually. But when I first read it, I think it has been subsequently modified, I missed a very simple point. So, I thought I would just go ahead and document it here for myself.

First, download picture.tar from plugins extras. Move the tar archive to your nanoblogger directory. Untar picture.tar. This will place picture.sh in plugins/ and plugins/entry/.

Next, cd to the blog_dir/ and make a new directory images/small/. Modify the templates/entry.htm and permalink_entry.htm to include $NB_Picture immediately above $NB_EntryBody (I suppose you could place it wherever you want).

The file nb_dir/plugins/entry/picture.sh needs to be heavily edited. The original file has site specific modifications for the developer of the script. You need to remove the 'archive/' folder from the 'img src' (location of photos), unless you use it, but it is not standard for NB pictures.

It is interesting that picture.sh has the variable PICTURE_DIR="${BLOG_DIR}"/"$ARCHIVES"/"$IMAGES", even though I don't have images under archives, anywhere. Guess I just don't understand that part of the script yet.

To include a picture, save it as either 'current.jpg' or 'current.png' in your blog_dir, before you begin to edit the blog entry you want associated with it. You do not have to reference the image in your blog entry, this was my mistake. Just place the file in your blog_dir and when NB updates itself, your photo will be included.

Works great!

I can't believe it! I feel like I have been trapped inside the auto-formatting 'feature' of MSWord for the last hour! I must be tired. I forgot that there is a substitution error in electric menu of AlphaX on the G4, which turns \frame{ into {\frame. This caused me serious wasted time and annoyance for the last hour. I even compared to an old document and didn't notice. Damn! Plus, the dogs pissed in the house again, after an hour and a half walk! I was mad. I'm sure that didn't help with figuring this out either.

I thought that NB might be faster on this OBSD alpha than the Mac, and it appears that it is. Incredibly fast. Of course, I don't have articles, pictures, etc. just yet.

The other thing I need to note, is that /home/.nb.conf should be 'dot' file. I did not have it as such on either computer until now. That's all for now, will continue to play with this and see what happens. Need to set the editor to emacs so I can have some spell checking that I am familiar with.

I finally have NB installed on the OpenBSD Alpha! Nothing is straight forward. If I thought things were confusing on the Mac, think again. It was nice to have installed it on the Mac first, not get an idea of how it works. Less confusing and more people to ask for help.

Of note, it appears that you do need to have a nb.conf file in the same directory as nb. In my case, this is /usr/local/bin/.

A couple of things. First, NB looks for bash in /usr/bin/bash, not /usr/local/bin/bash. The very first line of /usr/local/bin/nb needs to be modified to reflect this change. Easy, once you know that. Second, when creating a new blog, nb would not copy the necessary files over automatically. The suggestion by NB author was to use: cp -r "$data" new_weblogdir/. This continually resulted in the 'No such file or directory' warning, even though I created new_blogdir first with mkdir. Using cp -R default/ alone did not work either, since it is equivalent to rsync directory, not rsync directory/, which is what I needed. So I had to cp each file and directory in default/ to the new_blogdir. This then worked just fine. We'll see how it goes when I try to compile the blog for the first time.