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Messing around with blogging tools

Messing around with blogging tools.

I’ve got a test installation of Greymatter going, and I’m trying to spin up MovableType as well. Now I need to figure out if I can make these tools do what I want, or if I need to proceed with my own weblog implementation.

Sunpig is currently built on PHP/MySQL. Using the web editing interface, we can create day entries, and we can edit the left-hand sidebars. There’s a file upload function, but it’s not really usable in its current format.

What we can’t do is easily change the format of our log pages, or archive pages. We also can’t use the interface to create new static pages, although I suppose that a fixed pointer to a past daily entry would suffice.

I’ve looked at, and discared the idea of using Blogger or Frontier (or a Frontier-based service like EditThisPage.com). Both of them give you a very snazzy web interface for creating and editing your blogs. I would like the blogging tools to reside at sunpig.com, though. Blogger will allow you to publish to any site you like, but the tools remain at Blogger.com. And in order to get Frontier installed on sunpig.com, I’d probably have to invest in a dedicated server, which is waaay too expensive.

Greymatter is interesting. It’s a set of Perl scripts, which you place on your own site (provided you can run cgi scripts). These scripts allow you to create and edit your blogs in a very flexible manner, using templates.

I love the whole template thing. If I decide, in the end, to write my own tools for doing the sunpig logs, I will definitely be building a template-based system.

Greymatter has a number of disadvantages, though. First of all, its method of data storage concerns me. For each day entry, it stores both a .cgi data file (containing the text of the entry), and an HTML file, which contains the text with all your templates applied to it.

From the point of view of serving up your files, this is great. All the hard work is done when you apply the template (when you edit the file), and when someone requests the page, all the web server has to do is serve up a single file. The downside is that if your templates are large, each HTML file will take up a large amount of space. Say each page is 25K (not difficult if you include the HTML for a calendar). After 40 entries, you’ve used up 1MB of space, regardless of how big those entries were.

We’ve got 100MB to play with on Sunpig. This may sound a lot, but it gets eaten up very quickly by the amount of photographs we’re putting up. We’ve already used up close to 25MB. I can easily see us running out of space within a year if we don’t manage this carefully. I’m reluctant to just trade off space for performance, when this is really just a family site. It only gets a couple of dozen hits a week.

Secondly, the process of updating and re-applying templates across all files seems prone to errors, and to screwing up your site. You’re not allowed to interrupt Greymatter while it’s performing this update. I’ve heard stories of this going badly wrong, due to simple things like a modem dropping a connection, or accidentally shutting down your web browser.

I’m convinced of Greymatter’s flexibility: in that regard it is great. You can run as many instances of it on your site as you like, and this is probably how I would do our web logs vs static articles. But I am not convinced of its robustness and reliability. Noah Gray, who wrote it, has said that he won’t be producing any new versions (at least, for now).

There is an active community of users who appear capable of fixing most things that go wrong, though. And because you download the code and put it on your own web server, you can edit the code yourself.

This, however, is another reason for mistrusting the application. The code is horrible. It’s one monolilthic cgi perl script, full of variables, constants and functions with nondescriptive names like “thomas” or “FUNNYFEETRELEASE”. Just thinking about it makes me shudder.

However, despite it all, the blogging interface itself is relatively easy to use. Which may well be an overriding requirement for Sunpig.

I’ve only really started looking at MovableType this evening, and I don’t have a working installation yet, but certainly the code behind it looks better. It has the disadvantage of being a 1.0 release, but the folks who developed it look like they’re actively progressing new releases and bug fixes. Which can only be a good thing.

I don’t know how its file structure works yet, but I’m going to play about with it some more, and we’ll see what happens.

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Farmers market

We went out to the Edinburgh Farmers Market again today. We bought some sourdough bread from the Valvona & Crolla stand, some wild boar sausages, some diced venison haunch (earmarked for stewing tomorrow), a pack of whole beef beefburgers, and a fresh trout from Drummond Trout Farms. Farmers markets are great!

After that, we wandered along Princes St., picking up bits & pieces. We bought a stack of CDs (Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, Courtney Pine) and DVDs (When Harry Met Sally, Ultraviolet) in the HMV sale. Abi also bought a lovely new autumn coat, some long-sleeved shirts, and a couple of fuzzy turtlenecks.

I was tempted to buy another game for my PS2 at Electronics Boutique. But after having made the mistake of renting the abominably dull Timesplitters from Blockbuster earlier this week, I decided to come home & check out some reviews on the web before getting my feet wet again. (Even though the ones I had my eye on were seond hand PlayStation (not PS2) games, and hence quite cheap.)

The three I was looking at were Metal Gear Solid, Final Fantasy VII, and Jimmy White Cueball. The reviews on MGS are pretty postive overall, but everyone says that the game is far too short. Probably not, then. Jimmy White Cueball looks like a fun game for picking up and playing for a bit, without having to sit down for an hours-long session–sounds good for £7.99.

As for Final Fantasy, I vaguely remembered that one of the more recent episodes in the series was utter pants. So I was even more wary of this one than the others. However, after having checked out the word on the web, it sounds like this is possibly the best of the whole series. Lots of deep plotting and character development set in a traditional(ish) video game RPG. Probably take a month or so to play it all the way through. Definitely a winner!

Now all I need to do is finish off these new blogging tools for Sunpig, so I can put up static articles (like, for instance, wishlists), so I can remind myself what it is I’ve decided to buy 🙂

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Ocean Terminal

Yesterday evening we visited the newly opened Ocean Terminal in Leith. It’s huge and grand, with lots of open space. Most of the shops are still in the “coming soon” phase, but there’s a decent-sized Debenhams, a smallish BHS, a variety of restaurants and bars, and a cinema. Very nice.

After that, we took a bus to the opposite side of town and had dinner at the Old Bordeaux. We’re regulars there now. The staff know us, and are always amazed to see how much B has grown since we were last in.

Last night was particularly special, though, because B had his first experience in a high chair! Just in the last week, he has been getting more interested in–and capable of–sitting up. Rather than have him on our laps for most of the meal, he took the high chair instead, and he loved it! He made a lot of noise by banging his rattle against his little table, and generally had a good time pretending to be all grown up. I think we’re going to have to get ourselves one of these wonderful contraptions very soon…

And once we got home, I uploaded the latest set of pictures. You can see them over on B’s page.

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Hey! Where did my data go?

Hey! Where did my data go?

I logged in this morning to write a little bit, and found that the stuff I’d written on Monday had disappeared! I know I didn’t delete the entry myself and I’m fairly sure that Abi would have told me if she had. That pretty much leaves EZPublishing in the picture: this is what would happen if they restored the database to a previous state (for whatever reason). If they did, they never told me about it.

Fortunately, Opera (the web browser I use) has a better caching facility than Internet Explorer. (Yet another reason to use Opera, in addition to my five main ones.) And because I’d viewed my Monday page after I’d submitted it, I was able to retrieve a copy of the text I’d written.

Note to self: improve the backup capabilities of the sunpig data. Write a script to extract the data, compress it, and email a copy somewhere.

So on to what I was going to write about in the first place: B’s cognitive development.

I remember learning about this in my child development classes at teacher training college. For example, newborns have no concept of “permancence”. If you hide an object, the baby will think it is gone. And B illustrates this marvellously!

A couple of years ago, Amazon.co.uk sent me a plastic thermos mug as a Christmas present. (We were buying a lot of books on-line at the time…) It has become my regular drinking vessel, and now B is taking an interest in it as well. He sees me lifting it up to my mouth, and so he now wants to grab hold of it, too. He takes it in both hands and gnaws on the rim. (It’s quite funny to see.)

But when he gets bored with just chewing on it, he starts batting it around. Because the mug doesn’t have a handle, it rolls very easily on the floor, and B chases after it with great enthusiasm. Until he pushes it too far, and it rolls under the skirts of the sofa. At which point, it’s gone! He doesn’t realize it’s just hidden from his sight, so he doesn’t try to reach after it. To his brain, the mug has just vanished, and so he has to go find another toy instead.

If he’s really lucky, mommy or daddy will reach under the sofa and get it back for him. And when he sees that the cup is back again, his face lights up with joy!

This also means that whenever one of us leaves the room, B thinks we’ve gone, too. He is starting to get the idea that Abi and I are permanent fixtures, and that even when we go away, we do come back, but it’s not all there yet. I don’t know at what point the game of “peekaboo” will become fun for him, rather than merely confusing. But I’ll write about it as soon as I know… 🙂

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This weekend was really good

This weekend was really good. It started with a relatively early departure from work on Friday afternoon (about 5 o’clock). Abi was in town, after having been out to lunch with Angela, followed by a bit of a wander and some coffee with my parents. We met up in Starbucks on Princes St., and I took B, leaving Abi free for the rest of the evening.

Before heading home, though, I pleaded with Abi for an indulgence. I have been wanting a new games console for some time now. After having played Gran Turismo 3 with Richard and Dave a couple of weeks ago, I decided that Playstation 2 was the way to go. Last year, I wasn’t convinced of the quality of the games available, but seeing some of the title around now–GT3 being the prime example–it’s clear that the PS2 is becoming a mature platform, with truly next-generation content.

Any console is going to take time to come into its own. I had been thinking strongly about getting an XBox when it comes out, because essentially it is similar to a PC, and it is less likely to have such a growth curve. But on the other hand, for this same reason its games are likely to have a desktop PC slant, and I already have one of those. I’m sure that a year after launch, XBox will have a wide range of great titles available. But by that same time, PS2 will have had even more time to mature.

I guess I’m just not an early adopter of games hardware…

Anyway, by the time I got home, fed B, and had some dinner myself, Friday evening was mostly gone. I didn’t get the PS2 plugged in until almost 10 o’clock! But right up until bedtime I had some highly excellent racing fun.

Now here’s how I know I’m a “grown-up”: when I woke up on Saturday morning, I didn’t run downstairs to play games straight away. In fact, I didn’t switch on the console again until late that evening.

I woke up feeling like I could use some exercise, and I wanted to spend a bunch of time with B. Abi was planning to go out to IKEA with Ange & Ange mother, and I was going to take the bunny for the day. So just before noon, I strapped on our cool new backpack, and B and I walked down to Cameron Toll to do some shopping.

The plan was to get some milk and bananas for B, and maybe some new fruit or vegetables for him to try (Abi had suggested some squash or pumpkin). In Sainsbury’s, I discovered that I felt like doing some cooking for Abi and me as well, so I bought a whole bunch of lovely stuff: a stack of chillies, shiitake mushrooms, celeriac, butternut squash, and much more.

On returning home, I did the washing up, and then started on a mega kitchen cook-off. I put together four dishes:

  • For Saturday evening, baked frogs legs with lots of garlic and parsley.
  • Also for Saturday, a chunk of beef, roasted in some red wine, and accompanied by roast winter vegetables: potato, sweet potato, celeriac, butternut squash, garlic and shallots. It’s the first time I’ve ever cooked celeriac, and it was delicious.
  • For Sunday, the start of a voodoo chilli. I had four pork chops, from which I stripped the rind and fat, and which chopped up finely. I heated the far in a pan, and then tossed in an onion, seven indian bird-eye chillies, a cayenne pepper, a scotch bonnet pepper, and a pile of cumin. Then the meat went in and cooked for a long while, followed by a couple of tins of kidney beans. At one point, the air was so heavy with chilli, that Abi couldn’t come into the kitchen without coughing. Excellent!
  • With the bones of the pork chops, the shiitake mushrooms, and some left-over chicken stock, I also made a hot & sour soup.

We watched Shakespeare in Love over dinner, and afterwards I caramelised some bananas, and we had them over ice cream. Lovely yum!

(Some Gran Turismo 3 happened at the end of the evening. You don’t think I was going to go a whole day without it, did you?)

Sunday was much less active. We just hung out around the house, watched TV (there was a good documentary on Discovery Civilization about the World Poker Championships, and Farscape is in the middle of a grand story arc right now: this was the episode where John gets Scorpio’s chip removed from his brain), played with B, read books, and I raced cars around Rome. I finished off the chilli with some tomatoes, and had several bowls of the stuff. My digestive system promptly went into shock, and I suffered a sore tummy for most of the night. All in all, it was a great day, and a great weekend.