AlphaBlog

Looks like I found my error! There is no fortune file named fortune, only fortunes. See! Easy mistake. So I put the following into my fortunes.sh file

fortune 50% fortune 50% limerick

Clearly, this didn't work. Before I realized my mistake however, I thought that the code suggested on the mailing list was wrong. But I don't think so. We shall see! :P

Still can't get the symlink to my user directories to work with the Apache server. Frustrating.

Aargh! I had modified the suggested fortune.sh code, thinking that was the problem. It does work, but receive complaint from nanoblogger as it is running the script. So let's see what happens now.

I'm having fun exploring the goofy fortune files on this machine. I managed to read quite a few last night during the slow times at work. So I changed this one here to take 50% from fortune and 50% from limerick. Also, there were gaps and holes in the original one yesterday, so I modified the fortune.sh file as someone on the NB mailing list suggested, basically taking out all the sed. We'll see!

OK. It didn't work. There may have been a typo on the suggested instructions that were posted. I have now modified the file, so we'll see what happens now. There was no fortune output with the above post.

I had placed the MOODS_DIR in the blog.conf instead of the URL. Of course, the little pictures can't replace text if the pictures cant' be found! I didn't really think hard enough about it, but obviously the moods directory must be uploaded to the website. I copied the entire moods directory to the main blog directory and updated the entire site. So let's see if it finally works!

Nothing is as simple as it sounds. ;P Like attempting to get moods working.

Let's see. Perhaps now it is working? I have figured that you need to place MOODS_URL in the blog.conf file for nb to find the moods configuration. Hopefully it works now.

Oops! Trying to get this symlink to the web directory working has not proved very easy. I managed to destroy my index.html page in the process. I'll try to rebuild it now and see if I lost the last entry.

I thought I would just check to see if entry moods were working. I think they should be, but I have never given them a try, so here goes.

I have been trying to set-up the alpha here to display the pages of this blog, but I've been having difficulty. I am attempting to use a symlink from my user directory into the web directory, rather than copying all the files over. It looks like you should be able to do that from what I have seen on the web, but I have failed thus far. I don't see a big problem with copying everything over to the we directory, but that seems like a waste of space. We'll see.

OK! I got the picture in there about as good as I can. I like the look. I used Gimp to take the raw tif file and convert it to png for the web. The photo is from Xochitl's most excellent film Countdown.

Not my strength as you can see. I'm trying to get this picture into the banner, but I'm having a bit of trouble getting it into the right place. I'll leave it like it is for now; better than nothing. I would like the image to be within the grey banner only. Plus, I need to crop the black frame. Waiting for vegetable risoto to finish.

I changed the last entry's categories to make it correctly under only Alpha. I wasn't clear on how to delete entries from categories. I had to ask for help. Maybe the directions were in the help section, but I didn't notice them. Anyway, this is how you do it:

• nb -l all to get the categories of all entries
• nb -c 1 -l all to get the entry numbers on a per category basis (important for deleting entries from categories)
• nb -c 1 -d 1 will delete the entry number 1 under category 1

This will delete the entry only from that category, not delete it entirely. You must repeat steps two and three for each category that you want to delete the entry from.

On a side note, I'm beginning to like vi more as I play with it.

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.

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!

The basic syntax is: nb [-b blog_dir] [options]

How to ...

• create a new weblog (directory) = nb -b [blog_dir] -a
• create a new entry = nb -a
• create a new category = nb -c new -a
• create a new entry for a category = nb -c [cat_id] -a
• list current entries = nb -l [current|all]
• list categories = nb -l cat
• list entries by category = nb -c [cat_id] -l [current|all]
• edit an entry = nb -e [entry_id]
• move an entry to a category = nb -c [cat_id] -m [entry_id]
• delete an entry = nb -d [entry_id]
• delete a category = nb -c [cat_id] -d cat
• delete an entry from a category = nb -c [cat_id] -d [entry_id]
• force update of weblog = nb -u [current|all|main]

Thank you for trying NanoBlogger. Please direct comments and suggestions to the mailing list or submit a bug report to the project page on sourceforge.net.