For quite a while now, I've been wanting to reorganise portions of this blog, and of www.pointy-stick.com in general. Rather than wait until everything's completely perfect, which will be approximately never, I've decided to roll out the bits that are done now and incrementally work towards the final version of Malcolm Blog 2.0 in the coming weeks or months. Thus, here we are.

[Update: It occurs to me, too late, that I've screwed up some file naming and expiry time settings. So one updated stylesheet is still served with the old name and had a one year expiry time. Thus, if the style looks a little off, try forcing your browser to reload all the page components. I'll fix that in the next rollout and try to be less of a bozo next time.]

Slightly different color scheme, different organisation of information, different layout. All new and yet mostly the same. As usual (where "usual" means "two years ago when I last rolled out some code here"), I've made the source code available for download in case you want to see how things are done. Keep in mind that this is still a work in progress, so there are changes to come.

For those who care about design-y features:

• the CSS is based off the YUI framework for the basic grid system and sizing. I've also put in a bit of effort to baseline-align a lot of stuff (thanks to all the people who've written articles about that over the past year or so) and keep things regularly spaced vertically, but it's not quite perfect. I won't be invited to the cool parties yet, since pages with images and code fragments both drift and there's a mixture of ems and pixels that mess things up on a long page. I'll fix those things one day.
• The site now works (better, at least) in IE 6.0, with the sidebar being at the side instead of falling off the bottom. No idea what it looks in Safari et al. I'm a Linux user, so I've checked it using Firefox 2 and using IE (running with Wine). That's all.
• I was unhappy with the amount of space the previous version devoted to metadata — things like dates and categories and permalinks. I don't want to not display that information, but I've put some effort into using the available space more efficiently by floating things around with CSS. For designers, this is possibly second nature; for me, it's closer to really hard work.
• Not amazingly happy with the colour scheme, but it's the best I've come up with so far. Didn't want to have too many colours and, surprisingly, the thing I found most difficult to style were the hyperlinks. The default blue didn't always work and I was struggling to find a mix between visible and intrusive. That was a lot trickier than I realised.

Topics: meta/blog

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As a result of the unexpected HTTPS redirects I mentioned here last week, I did a lot more poking around and still wasn't able to come to any definitive conclusion. Current leading hypothesis is that the mod_python environment is being messed up somehow. Since I'm running a very old mod_python, though, I can't really complain. I also can't easily update at the moment, since I would need to rebuild mod_python myself and that requires installing a whole bunch of speically built pre-reqs (no NPTL support in this virtual machine) and it all rapidly becomes a lot of work.

I ended up turning off all HTTPS support, since I don't need it at the moment. Unfortunately, this was on a day when my blog was linked from a number of more popular sites and people started subscribing to my Atom feed. I suspect a number of them subscribed to the HTTPS version and are now seeing 503 status codes. A lot of 404 responses going out, too, for reasons I can't understand. So, apologies to those who got unlucky (and who won't be reading this). Not much I can do about that, since I don't have time to reinstall the system at the moment to upgrade to a more current distribution.

Topics: meta/blog

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If you've tried to access various pages (particularly in the archives) here over the past couple of weeks, you may have been inundated with a bunch of warnings about an expired SSL certificate. I was seeing them, too.

What was strange, though, was why. None of the public portions of this site use HTTPS. So I couldn't work out why requests were being redirected to https://... URLs. Even after a lot of poking around, I still cannot work this out and I'm not a neophyte when it comes to debugging or configuring Apache. Short conclusion: restarting Apache seems to have cured the problem. Fingers crossed.

Updated a couple of hours later: And now it's back to broken again. This is just embarrassing. People are noticing.

Topics: meta/blog, technology/web

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I just rolled out a new version of the code (so anybody viewing this in the past 15 minutes was probably getting a 500 HTTP error as I debugged one little onsite problem). As promised previously, the latest version of the code (1.5) is available for download. A list of the changes, which are very minor bug fixes, is contained in the NEWS file in the release.

Topics: meta/blog, software

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Turns out these blog entries don't write themselves. And I've been busy — mostly on a few small work projects; hence the slight pause in proceedings. I have been keeping a "things I want to write about" list and it is growing alarmingly. Most of the items are currently Django related, so I'm going to try to spread them out so as not to completely bore people who are not interested in Python frameworks.

In lieu of releasing any real software over the weekend (I fixed some bugs, though. Does that count?), I added a README file to my weblogging software, the code that runs this blog, and put up the tarball. You can download the current version (version 1.4, rolled out today) or save a link to the latest version. The latter link will be updated whenever I release a new tarball. I will try to remember to put a new version in there whenever I update the website.

My hope is that this will either serve as a help or a warning to others.

Topics: meta/blog, software/django

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Time to launch this thing, I guess. A bit anti-climactic really. No all-star party, no popular magazine coverage, not even a few friends around for some beers. Just push it out into the ether and listen for the splash. Yet another blog way down there in the very long tail.

Like all self-written software projects, this one is not complete. There are a number of things I do not like about the current site and an even larger number of things in the TODO list as enhancements. But they can all be fixed later. It works well enough for a 0.1 release. By setting the current iteration free onto the web, I will hopefully prevent certain online friends greeting me with "do you have a blog yet?" and we can return to the more traditional "hello" form. I will have my own soapbox and a place in which to centralise all those things I want to write about.

I like to write. I am not necesarily particularly good at it, but I can usually get my point across. And I like explaining things to others. So with any luck, there might be a few instructional and tutorial articles floating around here in a bit. In a previous blog I had at Advogato, I realised I had drifted away from the purpose of being entertaining and was mostly using it to rant. I deliberately stopped posting there for just that reason. I aim to reign in those impulses here. Most importantly, this will hopefully keep me in practice. A writer is somebody who writes. It is only succesful writers who generally need to be able to write well (although even that is not a universal requirement).

There is no particular thread to what I want to write about. Some of my favourite online sites do have a common theme, whether that is the author's intention or not. But there are also some good collections of less tightly linked knowledge around, too (I am intentionally not including links here; later maybe, but for now, my preferences remain my own). I have decided just to write about whatever interests me at the moment, whilst trying to avoid the Friday Cat Blogging style of noise (guess you need to have comments enabled for that one to work in any case). If my interests do not match yours, no harm done. I'm sure there are other places you can visit on the World Wide Web -- it's pretty much big by definition.

So let's see what happens. Hopefully it's enjoyable to the audience, even if only in the same way as watching disaster movies presents a nice distraction. Questions, comments, offers of large amounts of money can all be sent to my first name at pointy-stick.com. One day there will be a comment system here (I have a couple of tweaks I want to make to Django's existing setup first) and even support for those new-fangled pingback or trackback things all the cool kids seem to have. But for now, it's read-only.

Topics: meta/blog

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