I've got to get all the scraps of paper out of my laptop, so I'm going to make a few notes here.
Review makeblog.pl and blog.css and see if those guys are "done," including validating CSS and XHTML.
Review the status of various rc files on my various hosts:
.bashrc.bash_profile.exrc.vimrc.muttrctidy.cfgWrite myself a grub tutorial. I need to know how to boot SystemRescueCD and fix up a broken boot record.
to-mars.org: Contact Form; Search Box; Membership Application Form.
.txt File Naming IssuesThe file was created (by a little Perl script I just wrote) with a name equal to the current date and time.
And we've got a little logical flaw here. Since I saved it for the first time a minute after I created it, it already has a "Modified:" stamp on it when run through makeblog.pl. Nope, got to rethink this.
I think what I need is a script that looks through the current directory for .txt files and offers to rename or edit any whose names don't match the datestamp regex. It could also offer to create a new file or to list (for editing) those files whose names do match the regex.
I'm back on the train after a week's vacation. We didn't "go anywhere," although we did probably see more movies and have more dinners out than we would have during a "normal" week. We spent the week getting things done around the house, getting our lives back in order, etc.
I spent some time on George's site, but there will be more to do this week. He's leaving today for his cross country drive to DC for the Mars Society Conference.
We need to create the Donate page and get a functional PayPal button on it. I need to get the search function working. To that end, I need to install swish++ on this laptop. I should be able to fit that in today at work while the laptop is connected to the 'net.
And I need to create a contact form. to-mars.org email addresses are forwarding properly, but I have to look at gmail.com and see if it's possible to customize the From: header. I suppose I need to look at the MTA (currently sendmail) on my server and see it I can get "real" email up and running.
The other thing I need to deal with is the make file. It was working fine, but it was huge and hard to maintain. I created some variables and macros and it's now very short and works perfectly except for one thing: If I don't specify a target it remakes everything even if it should only be remaking a single file.
Running make -d is pretty (scarily) revealing.
I'm afraid my lack of exercise and lack of discipline when it comes to eating is catching up with me. Although my cholesterol numbers were slightly better when I had bloodwork done recently, my weight continues to climb.
As of today it's back to the A train for my inbound commute and the walk up the hill to my office. And the daily trek up the stairs from the 5th floor to the 10th floor goes back in my regime as well.
I haven't really been on a bike at all this summer. That has to change as well.
I got the rear derailleur swapped out on my beater bike during my week off. I need to adjust the derailleurs and then it will be ridable for trips reasonably close to home. Before I use it on a "real" ride I need to install a rear brake, and I'd like to swap the wheelset. Currently running a Suntour cassette on the rear. With Shimano I'll get indexed shifting. I have a wheelset with a Shimano 7-speed rear. Minor problem is that it's 126mm spacing and the Volpe has 130mm. I'll just force it in for the near term. If the wheels are satisfactory I'll respace the rear. I respaced an Ultegra rear from 130mm to 135mm for my Atlantis, so I know it's not really a big deal.
I'm also thinking about bringing my Trek to my office. I'm going to look at a used trainer today. If I decide to buy it I'll have to keep it at the office 'cause there just isn't room at home. I'm pretty sure there's room in my office for a bike and a trainer. I can ride the bike outdoors when the weather permits, and indoors when it doesn't.
to-mars.org is Coming AlongI still have a little synchronization problem. I know I updated the Links page on the site, but somehow I failed to migrate it back to my laptop. I wonder what other mismatches there are?
I see that I've been neglecting my blog. That's because I've been using my commute time to work on George's site. I find myself generalizing things as the structure of the site comes more and more into view. Each page has a name=value style configuration file, and a data file which is Text::Textile markup. There are many items that can be configured, but the vast majority are defaults, at least for this site.
In my original conception each page had a menu file, but again, the majority of pages display the same menu, the only difference being the unlighted item. So that's been generalized as well. A page can still have a unique menu, but most don't.
Everything is built and rebuilt with make. Right now the Makefile is much bigger than it needs to be. I need to learn about make macros and clean that up. I think that's the next mini-project for George's site.
I have a note to look at hostelshoppe.com for a clean, albeit table-based, design.
A layout I'm fond of consists of a full-width header, a full-width horizontal navigation bar for main site-navigation topics, a relatively narrow left (fixed width, generally) sidebar for more detailed navigation, either of the entire site or of the "local neighborhood." One might add a search box to the left sidebar.
+----------------------+ | + | + +----------------------+ +----------------------+ | | + | | + | | + | | + | | + | | + | | + | | + +----------------------+ +----------------------+
The main content goes in the right column, which is wide and fluid.
Finally, there is a full width footer with copyright information and/or other legalese. Perhaps also a link to contact information if it's relatively unimportant to the site's purpose and need not show up more prominently.
The site's home page should display completely (no scrolling required) and comfortably in a full screen browser on an 800×600 screen. The idea behind this is the we want our visitor to be able to grok what the site's all about "at a glance."
I managed to implement most of my "ideal" design at to-mars.org. Only the full width footer isn't there (yet). The footer is the width of the right (content) column.
My feeling is that perhaps in special cases a third column could be added to the right for breaking news or announcements of special importance. But for the vast majority of pages in a typical site, two columns is preferred.
The textile Quick Reference seems not to display properly on this laptop. It may be that I haven't installed utf-8 support. I need to check into that.
en_US ISO-8859-1
en_US utf-8
I added the second line to /etc/locale.gen and then ran locale-gen. (And it made no difference in how the page was displayed). Should I restart Firefox?
I did. No change. I suppose it's conceivable that a reboot might change something. I wonder how my desktop (rescue partition) does with this?
Also, the Quick Reference seems to suggest that I don't need to knit my lines together into one long paragraph. There may be an option to set somewhere.
"Line breaks can be disabled in RedCloth by turning on fold_lines."
Perhaps there's something equivalent in Perl. Nope, at least I couldn't find anything in perldoc Text::Textile.
And how does one do a non-breaking space in textile?
There are a few things I need to get taken care of to get my various development environments healthy and in sync.
grub on my desktop. I'm pretty sure it has to do with kernel updates under apt-get.grub tutorial so I can boot SystemRescueCD and fix a broken grub configuration.Textile quick reference installed everywhere.torsmo working on the rescue partition on my desktop and then yard out xfce4 and mimic the lwm environment running on this laptop.swish++. This blog is a good enough place to start. to-mars.org will be the first "real" target.v2.0 Ready to ReleaseI think everything is cleaned up to the point that I can officially label makeblog.pl v2.0. I added temporary links in the footer to test XHTML and CSS validity. Once tested (and any fixes applied) I'll remove those.
One more pass through the source code to clean things up.
Also I'll want to run it against an old set of .txt files and make sure it "falls back" correctly.
Now that everything is fully functional I can play with the style sheet at my leisure.
I seem to have the creation/modification date business working properly. It seems to me that there are a few things I still need to fix. I'm pretty sure I tagged them with ## FIXME ## comments.
stdoutOK, all done (with those). There are a couple of minor issues having to do with configuration defaults that will fall out when I make this system the primary blog creation system and move the old system to makeoldblog.pl.
to-mars.org Alive and Wellzoneedit.com got their issues resolved and we can now get to George's site in a normal fashion.
I took a look at the punbb style sheets and it should be pretty easy to convert the Sulfur style to blend well with the to-mars.org site.
I also need to make sure that I'm using colors from the 16×16×16 cube. The pages look a bit different on the laptop but I don't know if that's because of the LCD or if it's because I'm running 16bpp and the colors I've chosen for to-mars.org are falling back to 16-bit. I can't even remember quite what I did to come up with those colors. I just wanted them to be "Mars-like." Red Planet, you know.
I just took a look at the stylesheet and the colors are surely not from the old 216-color palette.
At this point my ToDo list looks like this:
punbb with two boards, one for to-mars.org and one for ourmanpann.comto-mars.org so they're compatible with 16-bit displayspunbbI spent a good chunk of time this weekend working on to-mars.org. I need to refresh my memory with respect to how far along I am toward converting this blog to the Textile-based format. If I recall correctly, it's pretty much done except for the Creation/Modification Date issue.
OK, memory refreshed. There is a script, new.pl, that generates a table-free, minimal CSS output. And all that remains to do is indeed the Creation/Modification Date issue.
I also clearly need to get a comprehensive Text::Textile reference manual for the laptop.
OK, I seem to have most of the issues under control. Xvesa is working in 16bpp mode. lwm is fine for my purposes. I've got torsmo doing pretty much what I want it to do. Firefox runs, albeit slowly.
There may be a few kernel/module tweaks that would be beneficial. In fact, there exists a .586 kernel I should try. Looks like I need an upgraded kernel for this puppy anyway. I also have to figure out whether I need both of these:
ii kernel-pcmcia- 2.4.27-10sarge Mainstream PCMCIA modules 2.4.27 on 386
ii pcmcia-cs 3.2.5-10 PCMCIA Card Services for LinuxIn order to test packages like WordPress and Textpattern and Drupal I'll have to install Apache and PHP. I don't have any illusions about performance of those resource hogs on this laptop.
makeblog.pl version 2.0I'm editing this file so that the modification time will not match the creation time encoded in the filename. This is the last step in testing my new blog script (I hope).
I've been working on a simplified style sheet for a table-free CSS and XHTML version of my makeblog.pl script. The new version will also support Text::Textile markup.
A functional style sheet is done and the markup will not be that much different from what is generated by the current script.
I'm going to support Date Modified along with the current Date Created and that presents some logical issues to work out. I'm going to use a file naming convention to implement this feature and I've already got helper scripts working that make using this convention relatively painless.
The new script will be backward-compatible in the sense that if you just drop a bunch of files with the .txt extension in a directory and run makeblog.pl against that directory, then only one date will be generated: the Date Created will be the file's modification time.
ls -r *.txt will get the renamed files in proper display order. It remains to put any other files in their proper places.