Nigel McNie

My website colour scheme is cool. Evonne said so, and she's a graphic designer!

Apparently, #FAF26A is in the safe zone to be cool in 2008 :)

Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and follow me on twitter to hear about new posts early.

Want to share this post? Tweet

The hacky first - I've been hacking some more on my blogging "software" - if you can call it that - and now I can add, edit and delete blog posts from the command line/vim. There's also a one step deploy command as well. I fixed up the HTML4 validation problems and did some other cleanup too. Who knows, maybe one day it will be in a condition to release :P. At the moment though, it still stinks to high heaven of "big hack".

While working on it I've been sorta listening to The Rock, a radio station, which has been playing in the lounge for the last few hours. I have to say, it's been everything I thought it would be - repetitive, boring and mainstream. I've heard "Bleed It Out" by Linkin Park twice and some new song from the Foo Fighters three times over the time I've been listening in. There are little soundbites, like the one declaring Michael Jackson as the ugliest musician for 2007, repeating every now and then too, which quickly get boring. And of course, advertising. It's not a good sound.

Anyhow, in other, better sounding news, Mahara has a few more blocktypes now, in the blog and profile department. The blog blocktype still does its pagination through javascript, because there was already code to do that, but this can be fixed later. So once the resume related blocktypes are done I can go back to the template migration [1] that Penny started.

Also, we have a Summer of Code student working on Mahara - in particular, implementing forums for groups! That will be a real boost for the social networking side of things. If all goes well, the forums will be merged for 1.1 and there will be an API in place to implement more things for groups, such as wikis/polls/games etc.

[1]	Script to migrate views in the old template format from 0.8 to the new view format in 0.9

Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and follow me on twitter to hear about new posts early.

Want to share this post? Tweet

I decided recently that I wanted to start posting to this site more regularly. This means smaller postings in general, which means "blog". But I still wanted my site to be authorable in vim, and I wasn't that interested in having people's comments around. So, given that it was a long weekend, I've hacked up a script that lets me author a post in vim/rst, which it takes and deploys to the website.

Well, it's a bit more complicated than that. It stores the post locally in a postgres database, and then rebuilds the entire site, so that the blog archive pages are recalculated. I'm planning on adding support for editing/removing posts, and editing the other static pages. I'll also have to work out a way to deal with images.

But the net result is a site I can edit in vim, writing in restructured text, that is extremely high performing and secure. It's also a huge hack ^_^. But I wouldn't have it any other way.

I also gave the design a bit of a facelift - the whole 'site in a small window of the page' thing was making me annoyed. Not sure how I ended up with a yellow theme but sometimes these things happen. It'll probably only look good in firefox/linux, as I decided I liked the default fonts but couldn't work out their names so have just declared them as 'serif'/'sans-serif' in the stylesheet.

Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and follow me on twitter to hear about new posts early.

Want to share this post? Tweet