Shiny new Drupal site
Sat, Jan 15, 2011
Well, I guess org-jekyll didn't work out so well after all.
In practice, there's one little problem with static HTML; you have to generate the whole site every time you post. It might be possible to avoid this through careful coding, but as soon as you finished that, you would realize, what about comments? Or doing other stuff with posts besides sorting them by tags? Or adding custom fields that don't depend on <div> code snippets? Or have tags that auto-complete?
Speaking of comments, I see that many jekyll sites are just popping in Disqus, or some other external commenting tool, but I think that breaks the whole "elegance" thing.
Anyhow, after working with Drupal for several months, I'm pretty much sold. Long-time followers of the site will know this isn't the first time I've migrated to a new system, eyes starry with hope. But I worked with Joomla! for years, and never even thought about migrating my own sites. Yick. So maybe this is for real.
Still, I'm not sure I could have made that jump back into a web-based CMS without Conkeror. This alternative browser lets you edit textareas with a decent set of Emacs key-bindings, which means that dashing off a quick post like this, in your web browser, mostly Just Works, instead of feeling like you're trying to run through a graveyard in the dark. Yeah. Okay, I can't think of a better simile at the moment, but the idea is that in a normal browser, you keep tripping over keystrokes that ought to work, but don't -- you try to leap to the start or end of a line, or delete a few words backwards, or slash the rest of a sentence, and either nothing happens or else something stupid. So, with Conkeror, things work, and writing in the browser isn't so bad.
Of course, anyone who has had a webmail "Compose" page eat up a 3,000 word love letter when the browser burps will know that, officially, I can't support anything so irresponsible as composing outside of a text editor. You should be able to save every thirty seconds without even thinking about it. That's my official position. Period.
But enough about me. How will Drupal help you?
- You can finally add comments (I promise to moderate them fast). You can even add a comment right now, to this very post!
- You can look at a nice shiny site, all prettied up.
- And I can finally start posting again, now that it's not so painful.
On a side note, why are all my links at the end of the article? You'll have to wait and see.
blosxom
I've never run a website with jekyll, but I'm currently designing one with blosxom (the Perl version) right now, and I'm sold pretty hard. Honestly, I mostly picked it because (a) posts are not written in one of those awful textareas, and (b) my server charges extra for database use and I didn't want to pay it. But working with it for a little while sold me.
I thought I remembered seeing pyblosxom logos on your old site at some point. What did you think of that? The Perl blosxom allows use as a cgi script or to generate static pages; I've never tried the former, as it's such a quick script that I never saw the point in going static. (My server *doesn't* charge extra for Perl.) And it's customizable to a fault; things like comments can easily be made to work flawlessly.
This is Don Goodman, by the way; I can't find any options here for putting in a name without logging in.
pyblosxom woes?
Hi Don! Thanks for the note! Yeah, with Drupal you're either Anonymous or logged in, I'm afraid, though it's probably possible to change that behavior. You can always use a Spam Gourmet address. :)
I used
blosxombeforepyblosxom, but I switched topyblosxombecause, at least at the time, it seemed under more active development.Either script definitely has all the advantages you mention, and might still be the right choice for a lot of sites. But I found that once I got off the beaten path of posting blogs, the thickets were pretty dense.
This could easily have been my lack of Python knowledge. And I don't mind steep learning curves (alas), but now that I'm doing almost all my other web development work in Drupal, I couldn't justify spending hours to figure out how to do something in
pyblosxomwhen I'd already spent hours learning how to do it (and a lot more) in Drupal.And there's always an emacs mode that will let me post directly to Drupal if I get sick of these textareas. :)
The main problem with
pyblosxom, for me, is that every time I think my site will be "just" posts, I quickly find that I have lots of other functionality in mind. Since I've wound up making web sites professionally, maybe this is a personal problem that I don't share with the wider world.Anyhow, I'm curious to see your blosxom site, and how comments work in a flat file system. Maybe that's a recent development since I last had a look.
More on blosxom
Hey, Bill. Your spam system flagged my comment, so I'm emailing you
instead. (I *was* trying to sell you some ch34p m3dz...)
[Sorry, Don! So much for Mollom's text analysis; I've set the comment form to CAPTCHA for now.]
> Either script definitely has all the advantages you mention, and might still be the right choice for a lot of sites. But I found that once I got off the beaten path of posting blogs, the thickets were pretty dense.
Agreed. I don't know pyblosxom (and am skeptical of Python programs
in general; the one that I've used extensively is slow, buggy, and
eats memory like a ravenous wolverine), but blosxom is small, sleek,
and extremely hard to customize. It's infinitely customizable; lots
of plugins, of course, but those plugins are easily fixable for
individual installations, and writing plugins is pretty trivial once
you know the system (and Perl). I've fixed two plugins which did
*almost* what I wanted, but not quite. But it's dense, no question
about it.
> This could easily have been my lack of Python knowledge. And I don't mind steep learning curves (alas), but now that I'm doing almost all my other web development work in Drupal, I couldn't justify spending hours to figure out how to do something in pyblosxom when I'd already spent hours learning how to do it (and a lot more) in Drupal.
Assuming that both your options are FOSS, "I'm familiar with it and
know how to do what I want with it" is as good a reason to use
software as any other.
I've never used a Drupal-style content management system, so I can't
say much about it. (Unless you count the one on wordpress.org, which
of course I don't really have any role in managing.)
http://gorpub.freeshell.org is so small that it's actually 100% static
HTML and CSS; when I need to change anything about the layout that's
not pure CSS (add a button to the toolbar, say), I just use an ex
script. This works fine for a small site like that; not so much for a
big site with lots of variable post formats, lots of dynamic content
generation, shopping carts, and so on.
I'm actually designing two sites with blosxom right now. One's a
business site that looks *awesome* (not that I'm biased) but doesn't
have its content fully fleshed out; it exists only on my home server
safely walled off from the mean old intarwebs, so I'm afraid I can't
link to that. (It's a shame; it looks great.) The other's a personal
site for a novel I'm writing, which is extremely long (by necessity;
it's not that I've got diarrhea of the mout---well, it's not *just*
that I've got diarrhea of the mouth) and which I've decided to release
as a serial. I've only got two chapters up; the LaTeX to HTML
conversion is still buggy (htlatex is great, but it does leave
something for manual correction, which I'm trying to script but
haven't quite got yet), and the format is *awful*. Really grotesque;
it needs a lot of tender loving care. But it works, so if you want to
see blosxom comments, go ahead and post a couple.
http://gorpub.freeshell.org/plague/blosxom.cgi
When you're done laughing at how awfully 1997 it looks, post to the
"Introduction", since that's where I've put my test comments to make
sure everything's going right. I used the "feedback" plugin; I found
the "writeback" plugin to be inadequate for my needs. But feedback is
great; the only thing I wish was that the "previewed" comments didn't
look so much exactly like the posted comments. (Seriously, at least
put a box around them or something.) That's something I'll fix when I
get around to it (say, around 2017). But they still work correctly,
so it's a minor problem. And it really was just a matter of throwing
"feedback" into my plugins directory and restarting the script
(reloading the website).
Lots of other problems; the "find" plugin gives a nice regex search
functionality, but it formats the results terribly; that is, not at
all, simply concatenating the posts containing the result. I need to
fix that. I also need posts organized chronologically, not
reverse-chronologically (which should be relatively easy) and I need a
"next post" and "previous post" button on the bottom of each (I'm
pretty sure there's a plugin for that).
But it suits my needs, and most importantly it *doesn't* require me to
pay my server extra for a database. Which is the single biggest
reason I'm using it.
> And there's always an emacs mode that will let me post directly to Drupal if I get sick of these textareas. :)
Hey! Emacs is *never* the answer! Seriously, though, it's good
there's something else you can do; I truly loath typing in those
little white boxes.
> The main problem with pyblosxom, for me, is that every time I think my site will be "just" posts, I quickly find that I have lots of other functionality in mind. Since I've wound up making web sites professionally, maybe this is a personal problem that I don't share with the wider world.
It probably is; especially if you're going to be turning day-to-day
administration of the site over to a client who doesn't understand why
textareas are terrible, blosxom is not the answer. And not doing this
professionally, I really don't know what your requirements are; I was
just curious what you thought of the blosxom concept.
> Anyhow, I'm curious to see your blosxom site, and how comments work in a flat file system. Maybe that's a recent development since I last had a look.
I don't know about pyblosxom, but blosxom's file system is as flat as
you want it to be. There's an easily-changed variable in the script
that will tell blosxom to dig as deeply into your filesystem hierarchy
as you want it to (or as shallowly, of course). I like a flat system
for a website; it keeps URLs nice and short, and even if you've got a
lot of files namespace clashes are unlikely at worst. (My hard disk,
on the other hand, is deeply hierarchical.)
It's also not new; the writeback plugin's been around for a long time,
and feedback for a while, too. Does pyblosxom really not have an
equivalent?
Anyway, sorry for running my mouth; thanks for giving me your thoughts.
Don
blosxom successes
+AMDG
Well, Bill, I've actually succeeded in managing almost
everything that I said I needed to do in my last email in
remarkably short time. (Note that this fixes only exist on
my home server at the moment, so you'll still see those
problems in the online version, though I have updated its
appearance considerably.)
The credit for this goes to Perl and blosxom. Forty lines
of Perl automated the "next" and "previous" links perfectly.
(For the storyline parts; it still doesn't mingle with the
exceptional pages like "introduction" and "warning," but
that's easy to fix.) And a little bit of CSS (really; as
in, a single new class) took care of the comment previews
being too much like actual comments problem. And I've
updated the appearance a bit while I was at it.
I still need to get the find plugin to format its results a
bit, but right now I need to go to bed. God bless.
Glad blosxom is working!
> Assuming that both your options are FOSS, "I'm familiar with it and
know how to do what I want with it" is as good a reason to use
software as any other.
That's a significant statement, really. Think of all the endless discussions out there about which tool is a little faster, or more elegant, or whatever. We both think certain FOSS tools are better than others, of course, but still, once we invest in learning particular tools, I wonder if the point of vanishing returns for learning something new comes a lot quicker than I, at least, generally assume.
I'm glad blosxom's working out for you! It's good to see it in the hands of a more practiced Perl surgeon than myself. :)