Shallow Thoughts : tags : blogging

Removed RSS 0.9.1 feed; Calendar Working Better

Fixing the Disqus comment system required regenerating the pages for old blog articles, to add the comment sections back. But doing that made me realize that the calendar wasn't right on a lot of pages.

This blog uses PyBlosxom, an excellent minimal blogging platform that is, unfortunately, no longer actively maintained. So I knew I couldn't count on anyone else fixing the calendar. I dug into the code and eventually found the problem, so I've regenerated all the blog pages and will be updating my PyBlosxom fork and sending a pull request upstream.

But while watching all those pages regenerate, I was struck by the three flavors of RSS generated for every page. It seemed excessive. I'm guessing that by now, anyone who's still using RSS (I certainly am!) can handle either Atom or RSS 2.0. So I've removed the RSS 0.9.1 feed. If you were using it, please update to the RSS 2.0 or Atom feed (see the links in the right sidebar).

If anyone was using RSS 0.9.1 and absolutely can't update to a newer format, drop me a line. If it turns out there was a good reason for supporting 0.9.1, I can put it back.

Tags: blogging
[ 08:44 Nov 16, 2020    More blogging | permalink to this entry | ]

Blog Comments should be working again

The Disqus comments here have been broken for quite some time, and I didn't realize it. I just thought nobody must interested in any of my alphabet topics. :-)

It turns out there were two problems.

Read more ...

Tags: blogging
[ 14:15 Nov 15, 2020    More blogging | permalink to this entry | ]

Change to the Blog: Index Page Only Shows Summaries Now

Recently, I was dealing with the RSS page for a local newspaper, and being irritated at how it had the full text of every story on the RSS page, not just the first few paragraphs like most sites do.

And then I realized that Shallow Thoughts has the same problem. In my defense, I set up this blog a long time ago (2004). And nobody complained, so I guess I just never noticed. Anyway, I think it's kind of rude to put the whole story on the index page; it's much more friendly (and the index page loads a lot faster) if there are just intros for each story, letting the reader decide whether to click through.

And then I had to figure out how to do that. PyBlosxom is semi-orphaned, but there are actually still a few developers (I submitted some fixes last year to get Shallow Thoughts working under Python 3, and they were quickly accepted) and everything still works. And the documentation is pretty good, too; it turned out I just needed to enable the "Readmore" plugin and add a couple of configuration lines.

So now the index page, both in HTML and RSS, is much shorter and should load much faster. I hope the change is welcome and doesn't cause any problems for anybody!

And now, on to today's "I" entry ...

Tags: blogging
[ 13:56 May 09, 2020    More blogging | permalink to this entry | ]

Blog Post Length: Fun with Shell Pipelines, GNUplot and Matplotlib

Sometimes I tend to ramble on, and wonder if articles I'm writing are really too long for a blog post. I try to keep them under about 200 lines, but sometimes a really meaty topic demands more. It occurred to me to wonder how long a typical Shallow Thoughts post is.

A quick measure is lines, which I can measure this way starting in the directory where I have the source files for all my past posts:

find . -name '*.blx' -exec wc -l '{}' \; | sort -h >/tmp/bloglen.dat

The find produces lines like:

79 ./linux/cmdline/random-command.blx

so if I sort -h (human-readable numbers), it will sort on the first column and give me a sorted list of all posts in order of size. The shortest posts, three of them, were only five lines; the longest was 346 lines.

But what's the distribution of lengths?

I can plot the sorted data easily with gnuplot:

gnuplot -p -e 'plot "/tmp/bloglen.dat"'

or, if I didn't want the temp file, I could have done that all with one command:

find . -name '*.blx' -exec wc -l '{}' \; | sort -h | gnuplot -p -e 'plot "/dev/stdin"'

That's kind of interesting. But I was really more interested in seeing a frequency distribution: do I have a lot more shorter posts, or longer ones? For that I do need the temp file.

I wasted some time trying to find a way in gnuplot to plot frequency distribution. The best I found was

set style fill solid
plot '/tmp/bloglen' u ($1):(1) t 'data' smooth frequency w boxes
pause mouse close

(put that in a file and then run gnuplot on that file).

But it's not actually right: the bargraph shows 1 for lots of blog post lengths that aren't represented in the data.

I finally gave up on gnuplot, having wasted enough time that I could easily have written a Python script, and did so, which only took a few minutes.

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

posts = []
with open('/tmp/bloglen') as fp:
    for line in fp:
        posts.append(int(line.split()[0]))

plt.hist(posts, bins=max(posts))

plt.show()

Turns out I'm doing pretty well at keeping them under 200 lines. The vast majority of posts are fairly short, with a peak around 50 lines, and relatively few exceed 200. Only a couple of outliers get over 300.

I think I'm okay with that. Whether you, the readers, agree -- well, feel free to tell me!

For comparison, this post is 95 lines.

Tags: linux, cmdline, gnuplot, blogging
[ 21:28 Nov 15, 2019    More blogging | permalink to this entry | ]

RSS was Down, Now Back Up, with Atom

A reader pointed out to me that the RSS page on my blog hadn't been updated since May.

That must be when I updated PyBlosxom to the latest version and switched to the python3 branch. Python 2, as you probably know, is no longer going to be supported starting sometime next year (the exact date in 2020 doesn't seem to be set). Anyway, PyBlosxom was one of the few tools I use that still depend only on Python 2, and since I saw they had a python3 branch, I tried it.

PyBlosxom is no longer a project in active development: as I understand it, some of the developers drifted off to other blogging systems, others decided that it worked well enough and didn't really need further tweaking. But someone, at some point, did make a try at porting it to Python 3; and when I tried the python3 branch, I was able to make it work after I made a couple of very minor tweaks (which I contributed back to the project on GitHub, and they were accepted).

Everything went fine for a few months, until I received the alert that the index.rss and index.rss20 files weren't being generated. Curiously, the RSS files for each individual post are still there; just not the index.rss and index.rss20.

I found there was already a bug filed on that. I tried the workaround mentioned in the bug, at the same time adding Atom to the RSS 0.9.1 and RSS 2.0 flavors I've had in the past. I haven't generated Atom for all the old entries, but any new entries starting now should be available as Atom.

Fingers crossed! if you're reading this, then it worked and my RSS pages are back. Sorry about the RSS hiatus.

Tags: blogging, pyblosxom, rss
[ 09:10 Oct 10, 2019    More blogging | permalink to this entry | ]

Nominated for FOSS Force Blog Competition

Shallow Thoughts has been nominated as a competitor in round two of the Foss Force Best Personal Linux or FOSS Blog Competition. There are plenty of excellent blogs on the list and I'm flattered to be included.

If you have a moment, take a look and vote for your favorite (whether or not it's Shallow Thoughts). You can vote for up to two. If nothing else, it's a good excuse to check out some excellent articles on free software from a variety of writers. Voting ends on Monday.

Tags: blogging
[ 12:05 Aug 18, 2013    More blogging | permalink to this entry | ]

Testing blog comments

Based on the offline comments I got, I'm going to try Disqus for blog comments.

Setting up an account was easy, and I think I have the PyBloxsom side working now. So this is a test post to see if comments are working. Feel free to post comments and see! In theory, you should be able to use OpenID, Twitter, Disqus or various other types of accounts.

Comments aren't visible on the blog home page, only on the pages for individual stories.

If you want to try commenting but can't think of anything to say, how about the Japan earthquake? Wow! My heart goes out to everyone affected by the huge quake or the tsunami that followed. Any good links to information about the quake?

Tags: blogging
[ 17:09 Mar 11, 2011    More blogging | permalink to this entry | ]

Blog Comment Services

People periodically ask me why I don't have comments on my blog.

It's not because I don't want to see user discussion -- I'd love that. In particular, several people had opinions on my recent post about locations for the SCALE conference, and I would have loved to see and participate in a discussion on that.

The hold-up is purely technical: my current blogging setup makes it difficult to add them and keep the system maintained.

But lately several services have arisen that apparently make it easy to add comments to otherwise static pages, and I'm considering trying one.

The candidates I know about are:

• Disqus
• Intense Debate
• Facebook

None of these is perfect. I believe they all require signing up, though the first two can use an OpenID account, and of course a lot of people already have a Facebook account. But it might be a lot better than no comments.

Readers of my blog: do you have a preference, or any experience with any of these services? ("Don't bother adding any of these" is also a valid option, as are suggestions for services I didn't list.) If there's a preference, I'll go with it ... otherwise, I'll probably just pick one and try it.

Please mail me your thoughts or suggestions. Thanks!

Tags: blogging
[ 22:16 Mar 08, 2011    More blogging | permalink to this entry | ]

Back up: sorry for the downtime

File under "Is it really worth running your own server?":

About a week before we'd planned to leave for SCALE, our router/firewall started acting flaky. Every could of days it would just stop routing, for no apparent reason. A few days before a trip is no time to debug a problem like that, so we re-purposed another router we happened to have sitting around. It seemed to work fine; we tested it from both inside and outside over several days, and everything was working fine.

We drove down to LA as planned, spent a few hours hanging out and having dinner with family, then decided on a quick email check before bed. Um ... check where? There was no shallowsky.com on the net ... nor any of the other domains we host from that server. Lovely. Down less than 7 hours after we'd left, and no way of fixing it until we got home a week later.

Luckily for me, a friend was generously willing to host my mail for the week I was gone (including the associated bucketloads of spam). That didn't solve the web downtime, but at least in theory I wouldn't miss any important messages that came in. At least, I wouldn't miss mail that happened to come from servers that checked the new MX record; turns out a lot of servers don't, and just keep re-checking their cached address for days or weeks, bouncing messages accordingly. Not much I could do about that.

Anyway, now I'm back from SCALE (the conference went well) ... and it wasn't the router at all. The repurposed router is chugging along just fine; it was the DSL modem that coincidentally chose our departure day to stop talking to the net. Never underestimate the power of coincidence.

Sorry for the downtime! Maybe it really is time to move this domain to an ISP.

Tags: blogging, downtime
[ 21:03 Feb 23, 2009    More misc | permalink to this entry | ]

Script to add tags

Python is so cool. I love how I'll be working on a script and suddenly think "Oh, it should also do X, but I bet that'll be a lot more work", and then it occurs to me that I can do exactly that by adding about 2 more lines of python. And I add them and it works the first time.

Anyway, it turned out to be very easy to go through all existing blog articles and add tags for the current category hierarchy, being careful to preserve each file's last-modified date since that's what pyblosxom uses for the date of the entry. add-tags.py

Tags: blogging, programming
[ 19:37 Feb 29, 2008    More blogging | permalink to this entry | ]

Got tags working with pybloxsom

Entries on this blog are arranged by category. But all too often I have something that really belongs equally well in two categories. Since pyblosxom's categories follow the hierarchy on disk, there's no way to have an entry in two categories. Enter tags.

Tags are a way of assigning any number of keywords to each blog entry. Search engines apparently pay attention to tags, and most tagged blogs also let you search by tag.

I wanted my tags to follow whatever canonical tag format the big blogging sites use, so search engines would index them. Unfortunately, this isn't well documented anywhere. Wikipedia has a tags entry that mentions a couple of common formats; the HTML format given in that entry (<a rel="tag" ...>) turns out to be the format used on most popular sites like livejournal and blogspot, so that's what I wanted to use. Later, someone pointed me to a much better tag explanation on technorati, which is useful whether or not you decide to register with technorati.

Next: how to implement searching? The simplest pyblosxom tags plug-in is called simply tags.py. All the others are much more complex and do tons of things I'm not interested in. But tags.py doesn't support static mode, and points to a modified tags.py that's supposedly modified to work with static blogs.

Alas, when I tried that version, it didn't work (and an inquiry on the pybloxsom list got a response from someone who agreed it didn't work). So I hacked around and eventually got it working. Here's a diff for what I changed or just the tags-static.py plug-in.

Additional steps I needed that weren't mentioned in tags.py:

• Add "#tags foo,bar" directives as the second line of an entry, right under the title; anywhere else in the file it will be ignored.
• You may ned to create the tag directories http://yoursite/tags/$tagname yourself (pyblosxom created the directories for me on the web server, but not on the machine where I first tested).
• In addition to the config file entries discussed below, if you use an extension other than .txt (or maybe even if you don't) you also need to set py[ 'taggable_files' ] = [ "ext" ]
• In your story.html template, include $tag_links wherever you want the tags line to go. But make "Tags: " or something similar be part of the pretext, so it won't be included on un-tagged entries.

I also wrote a little python index.cgi for my blog's /tags directory, so you can see the list of tags used so far. Strangely, tags.py didn't create any such index, and it was easier to make a cgi than to figure out how to do it from a blosxom plug-in.

And as long as I'm posting pyblosxom diffs, here's the little filename diff for 1.4.3 that I apply to pyblosxom whenever I update it, to let me use the .blx extension rather than .txt for my blog source files. (That way I can configure my editor to treat blog files as html, which they are -- they aren't plaintext.)

Anyway, it all seems to be working now, and in theory I can tag all future articles. I'll probably go back and gradually add tags to older articles, but that's a bigger project and there's no rush.

Tags: blogging, programming
[ 16:04 Feb 27, 2008    More blogging | permalink to this entry | ]

Shallow Thoughts URLs changing

Administrivia: I've switched over to using static files with pyblosxom, instead of generating everything from a CGI, to save some load on the server.

That means that URLs on this blog are changing to be a bit cleaner. For instance, this entry, instead of being http://shallowsky.com/blog/index.cgi?blogging/tostatic.html, becomes http://shallowsky.com/blog/blogging/tostatic.html instead. The RSS URL changes from http://shallowsky.com/blog/?flav=rss to http://shallowsky.com/blog/index.rss

The best top level URL to use is http://shallowsky.com/blog/

I've hacked up a python CGI script that will try to remap the URLs appropriately, so old feeds will continue to work for a while. But it probably isn't very robust, and I'd like to get rid of the script eventually, so please update any bookmarks you might have to this blog.

Tags: blogging
[ 23:38 Jul 26, 2006    More blogging | permalink to this entry | ]

Blogedit -- edit a file without altering the date

Lots of Linux blogging software, such as the pyblosxom I'm currently using, uses the Unix file date on for each posting to determine the date at which the entry was made.

This makes it very convenient to add new entries, but it also makes it tricky to go back and update an old entry without losing all information about when the entry was originally posted.

I've been using a little sh script I hacked up for the purpose, which parsed the output of ls -l and then passed that in to touch -d. It worked, but it was ugly and had problems with postings that crossed a year boundary or were too old (because the ls -l format varies).

I finally got around to rewriting the script in python. It's more robust now, and cleaner, plus it checks EDITOR and VISUAL instead of always using vi. blogedit

Tags: blogging
[ 23:51 Feb 15, 2005    More blogging | permalink to this entry | ]

Switched to PyBlosxom

I discovered this morning while trying to improve the layout of this blog that Blosxom (the perl version) keeps six processes running once a query has been made. So changes to the CSS don't actually show up on the web site, because the copies in the running processes' cache don't have the new changes. That makes it rather challenging to integrate new CSS changes into a Blosxom site. (There must be a trick -- I've seen some nice looking Blosxom sites, but there aren't any templates or hints in the documentation.)

So I went looking for alternatives, and decided to try PyBlosxom first since it didn't require any changes to the existing entries. It's very nice! Much easier to configure than perl blosxom, plus it comes with (a) CSS template samples and (b) a collection of basic plugins that actually work. Nice!

So now I have a sidebar and a category list as well as a calendar, and CSS configuration should be much easier from now on.

Tags: blogging
[ 17:07 Aug 26, 2004    More blogging | permalink to this entry | ]

Tried nanoblogger

I tried nanoblogger yesterday, wondering if it would fix the problems I'm having with blosxom (primarily, not being able to limit the display to a small number of entries then offer some way to get to earlier entries). It does fix that, but it has other problems: it has a lot of bugs involving duplicate entries that show up if you remove items or add them to categories, and the category management is a hassle (you have to refer to categories by number, there's no menu offered, and the command to list the current categories is nonobvious though of course it could be aliased).

A slightly bigger problem is that since entries are generated when they are initially input, any change to the entry format later doesn't get reflected in what appears on the web. Only sometimes it does. I wasn't able to find a command that just did "refresh entries" though adding a new entry sometimes accomplished that for older entries (as well as also introducing duplicates and other strange problems).

I was also a little bothered by not being able to preview the site locally (nb hardcodes the site's url, so links all go to the real site rather than the local copy, and css files work inconsistently -- they work on some pages but not others) but OTOH blosxom, being a cgi, obviously can only work through a web server and not as local files, so they both have that problem as far as maintenance on a disconnected laptop (and in both cases it can be worked around).

The default nb look (when it does use the css, which it doesn't always) is much nicer than the default blosxom look. For blosxom I'll have to write css and collect a bunch of plugins to get things that nb offers automatically, like a sidebar with topics and a calendar of past entries. That's an appealing side to nb. I'd be really tempted if those duplicate entries weren't such a problem. Hmm.

Tags: blogging
[ 10:48 Jul 23, 2004    More blogging | permalink to this entry | ]

Tried Blosxom

I'm testing out the possibility of switching to Blosxom. It was very easy to set up, and wasn't even that hard to move my entries over (thank goodness there weren't that many of them, though) but there's a showstopper: I can specify $num_entries, the number of entries shown on a page; but there's no way to get to the previous entries! You can specify a date if you know it, or a year, or a month; but in each case, it will only show you the first $num_entries entries for that time period.

Who would want to have a blog but have a bunch of unreachable entries?

I've asked around, googled, and spent an hour or so in the source (which makes it look like $path_info is set if a date or topic is specified, otherwise unset, and patti found a yahoo posting that suggested doing something like

$num_entries = ($blosxom::path_info ? 999 : 3);

but in fact, $num_entries is always null). I've been through all the plugins, too. How could this popular package be broken in such an obvious way?

Tags: blogging
[ 23:59 Jul 18, 2004    More blogging | permalink to this entry | ]