Blogging is futile

Multiple Move & Co.

abe+blog@deuxchevaux.org (Axel Beckert) — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 00:08:59 +0100

nion’s blog made me notice that many people don’t know mmv (multiple move), which approximately works like this:

mmv '*.htm' #1.html
mmv '*.foo.*' #1.#2.bla

Additionally, mmv also can copy, link or even append files when called as mcp, mln or mad respectively with the appropriate command line options.

When I told nion in IRC on #debian.de about mmv, HE pointed me to the Perl script /usr/bin/rename, which is in Debian’s perl package and therefore installed on nearly every Debian system by default. It moves files by applying perl subsitutions to file names:

rename 's/\.htm$/.html/' *.htm
rename 'y/A-Z/a-z/' *

Being curious, if the newly found tool is not only available in Debian, I looked on a SuSE 9.0 box and indeed, I also found there a /usr/bin/rename. But — surprise, surprise — it’s not a Perl script but an ELF binary. And although it does similar things than mmv and Debian’s rename, it is the simplest of the three commands:

rename .htm .html *.htm
rename foo foo00 foo?
rename foo foo0 foo??

Note to my self: Nice add-on for your command line efficiency talk.

wApua now in Debian Unstable

abe+blog@deuxchevaux.org (Axel Beckert) — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 00:38:30 +0200

Hey, the actual version 0.06 of my Perl written WAP browser wApua now is in Debian Sid!

It’s the first software written by me which has entered the Debian repository as its own package (since pum is included in the package pisg which is in testing now for a while) as well as the first software debianized by me which reached Debian Unstable.

Things are always exciting when they happen the first time. ;-)

Thanks to Myon for sponsoring the package.

wApua 0.05.1 released

abe+blog@deuxchevaux.org (Axel Beckert) — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 03:26:48 +0200

After more than five years without new release, there is now a new version of Perl written WAP browser wApua: 0.05.1. (Release announcement at Freshmeat)

It mainly fixes the use with newer Tk version as shipped with recent Ubuntu and Gentoo releases (Sarge still works fine with 0.05, but Etch won’t). It also fixes the local installation documentation.

Thanks to all who reported these bugs.

Blosxom Plugin Tagging Version 0.02: New Features

abe+blog@deuxchevaux.org (Axel Beckert) — Sat, 11 Mar 2006 19:17:46 +0100

Just hacked a few new features for my Blosxom plugin Tagging. It now shows you how many times you’ve used that tag. The number is always shown as title attribute to the link, but can optionally also be shown in parentheses behind the tag name or by the (CSS based) font size and/or color (start and end sizes/colors configurable). Also some default values changed (to my current configuration :-).

I saw that font size feature quite often during the last weeks and I liked it. I first tried to figure out, which system offers that feature and found that at least Serendipity’s freetag plugin offers it, but didn’t want to download Serendipity just for the plugin. So I decided, the algorithm for calculating the font sizes shouldn’t be that hard to find and coded it from scratch by my own. :-)

And while coding it I noticed that changing the color instead of the font size could be done the same way and that this feature isn’t much more difficult. So I implemented it, too.

Another new feature is that you now can configure the minimum number of postings a tag should have to show up in the list of tags.

The result can be seen in my blog on the right side under “Tag cloud”.

Now playing: Falco — Der Kommissar

Tagging with Technorati style in pure Blosxom

abe+blog@deuxchevaux.org (Axel Beckert) — Fri, 10 Mar 2006 03:22:12 +0100

Short summary: I can’t stay away from coding Blosxom plugins. Perl rules. PHP sucks. ;-)

New version 0.04 of the tagging plugin, supporting Technorati style tag links to many resources.
New add-on plugin pathbasedtagging to the plugin tagging, implementing Technorati style tag links in pure Blosxom without any help from Apache’s mod_rewrite.
New plugin dept offering Slashdot like “dept.” lines for Blosxom postings.

Supporting Technorati style tag URLs

After releasing the last version of my Blosxom plugin tagging, I noticed that Technorati only seems to like URLs ending in “/tagname” but not ending in “=tagname” (as they do if you use classic query strings instead of the path info), even if the a tag has a rel="tag" attribute. And not only I noticed this but also some other users of the plugin. (Although I do wonder how Furl made it to a Technorati partner with URLs like http://www.furl.net/furled.jsp?topic=tags…)

So I somehow had to change the syntax style for my tags. This wasn’t very hard for the links, but I wanted them to still link to my blog and not to Technorati, Flickr, Wikipedia or any other external resource.

Implementing Technorati style tag URLs

The obviously easiest solution for someone who’s using and administrating Apache web servers for nearly ten years now was to use some mod_voodoo—eh—mod_rewrite:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi/tags/(.*)$ /cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi?-tags=$1 [PT]

That way I could use Technorati style tags and had a well performing solution. But somehow this solution wasn’t that satisfying since it wasn’t pure Blosxom and therefore had some dependency including access to some Apache config file. (Even if the config file was called .htaccess. ;-)

A pure Blosxom solution

A few days ago I somehow noticed that in general a special behaviour on some URLs could also be implemented using Blosxom’s API. Using the entries function to modify the Blosxom internal path itself before Blosxom or e.g. the entries_index runs but not returning any hashes, allows to have some path like URLs not being treated as a path by Blosxom.

Unfortunately this couldn’t be incorporated into the tagging plugin itself, since plugins doing such path interpreting voodoo needs to be ran before any plugin supplying an entries function runs. But the tagging plugin must run after such a plugin. So I created the small add-on plugin pathbasedtagging which is solely thought for use together with the tagging plugin (but may have other, yet unknown purposes).

And since I got asked if they could use the tagging plugin to link to external tag URLs instead of the own blog, I included a ready to use list of more or less popular external tag URLs including Technorati, Flickr, del.icio.us, de.lirio.us and Wikipedia.

from the slashdot dept.

Since I’ve always liked the often sarcastic or even evil comments inside Slashdot’s subtitle alike dept. lines and since I’m also used to use them at Symlink, I wanted them in my blog, too. Time for a new plugin.

The basic work of parsing out the data from the text files the posts reside in was already written for the tagging plugin. So I just had to use that code, simplify it and add some little more code to get the dept plugin whose results you can see in my blog directly beneath the title of a posting since a few days now.

Update 02:52h

Hey, see my Technorati profile: It worked! Technorati recognised the tags! Yeah!

Blosxom plugin multcat released

abe+blog@deuxchevaux.org (Axel Beckert) — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 19:58:59 +0100

I like the idea of categorising blog posts and I like blosxom, but blosxom doesn’t allow you that one post belongs to several topics on different branches of the topic tree. And since there doesn’t seem to be a plugin providing such a feature — even not after looking through the blosxom plugin repository for the third time — I wrote it by my own…

So here is the blosxom plugin multcat, version 0.01. License is GPL v2 or higher.

multcat allows you to have postings in multiple categories by setting appropriate symbolic links without having them multiple times on the main page (or any category’s page which includes at least two categories, the posting appears in). It is designed to work together with categorytree, which still counts all occurrences of a posting.

Blosxom plugin tagging released

abe+blog@deuxchevaux.org (Axel Beckert) — Thu, 02 Mar 2006 02:22:12 +0100

I like the idea of categorising blog posts and I like blosxom, but even with multcat adding a post to multiple categories is somehow limited. In other blogs I often saw the technic of tagging articles with a keyword. I wanted that feature, too, but there weren’t any appropriate plugin for blosxom. Until now, because again, I just wrote it by my own…

So here is the blosxom plugin tagging, version 0.01. License is GPL v2 or higher.

tagging expects one or more “header” lines starting with “Tags: ” and being located directly under the first line, which always is the title. Those lines you can fill with comma seperated keywords (seperation by blanks possible via config) and shows them with appropriate links in $tagging::tag_list for the story template and $tagging::global_tag_list with all used keywords for the head or foot template.

Filtering is done using the -tags parameter in the query string. It uses the same delimiter as configured for the Tag header lines inside the posts.