GhostDriver 1.0.4, blog migration and blogging too little

Yes, I’m not blogging enough. Yes, it’s a shame that the world can’t read my terrible English on a more regular basis. Yes, I’m lazy. Well, here is a quick update for the few eager souls I have let down. GhostDriver I have release GhostDriver 1.0.4 - ā€œArghan Divā€. It should be released in the upcoming PhantomJS 1.9.2. The code has been merged already into PhantomJS master branch so, if you are really keen on putting your hands on it, just do a ./build.sh of that branch. ...

August 9, 2013 Ā· 2 min Ā· 275 words

Bloggart: a bit more code, a bit less sleep

Hi. I don’t know if you can notice it, but I just did few updates to the CSS of this Blog. Effects of sleep deprivation (no, I’m not THAT tired) If you are one of the few a followers of my Bloggart fork, you know what’s going on: Page support, changes to the ā€œSquaredā€ theme and more. I’m not yet where I want to be, but it’s getting closer. While I add small features to Bloggart, I learn its intricacies, and discover some small/medium latent bugs. Stuff that ā€œdidn’t happen because scenario x was never consideredā€: this is giving me some possibilities to fix and improve. ...

March 11, 2011 Ā· 1 min Ā· 202 words

Creative Common Attribution Share Alike, Skins and... understanding

Something very peculiar is currently going on behind the scene of this blog. My fork of bloggart has been taken and adapted to make a new website dedicated to a TV show, Skins. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. The work has been commissioned by a not well specified ā€œSkins Writerā€ entity to ScholisTech. I don’t like it So far, so good. It feels good to know that someone appreciates your work, isn’t it? ...

January 27, 2011 Ā· 9 min Ā· 1712 words

Bloggart: what's coming

Dear Bloggart belovers (like there were any out there…), this is a quick update on what’s happening with my Bloggart fork. Yes, fork - this is now the correct way to calling it. Initially I was just touching and modelling the software to my personal needs. Now I’m really going in my own direction. Anyway, let’s stay focused. I was here to tell you about a couple of new things that are coming to Bloggart. ...

January 10, 2011 Ā· 2 min Ā· 426 words

Minification and Templating for Bloggart

I’m sick home, but I can’t just sit in bed. It’s not how I work: I need to do something. So, I decided to give some love to Bloggart and put into proper code some features I already said I wanted to add. I just committed on my Bloggart fork quite a list of things: Support for JS and CSS ā€˜Minification’ (no obfuscation though) Support for JS and CSS ā€˜Templating’ (i.e. Being able to use App Engine Djiango Template grammar into JS and CSS files) Support for JS and CSS ā€˜Memcaching’ Show line numbers for ā€˜<pre>sourcecode</pre>’ areas in posts Even though this is simple stuff, two of them stand out I think: Minification and Templating. Why? Because even if those are not complex or new, they speed Bloggart up even more! Let me spend a couple of words on it, so that it can be useful for you, even if you are not planning to use Bloggart. ...

November 26, 2010 Ā· 3 min Ā· 522 words

From Wordpress to Bloggart

This post has been in my ā€œTODO listā€ long enough. It’s time to put it in words. Let’s go! As you probably know, I decided to give up Wordpress.org in favour of Bloggart on App Engine. A great choice so far I must say. Migration, a proper one What I wanted to achieve My aim was to migrate more than 6 years of content (posts and comments) from my previous blog at detronizator.org into a bloggart installation. Why bloggart? Nick Johnson, the original author of Bloggart on Appengine, wrote a series of article on how to build a nice, little, smart blogging app on App Engine. At the same time, work on txty.mobi started to get more and more engaging, making me a lover (and advocate) of Google App Engine. Plus, I was interested in ā€œstarting from scratchā€: Wordpress.org is a great project, but I just didn’t feel it ā€œmine enoughā€. My blog must feel really mine: it’s about me after all. ...

October 11, 2010 Ā· 8 min Ā· 1498 words

Making Bloggart Sidebar more Flexible

Bloggart from Nick Johnson is great. I think I made it clear that I love it (there hasn’t been a post so far with a mention about it). But it has some ā€œshortcomingā€: bits that a person like me, coming from Wordpress, always wishes were there. But no worries, we can always tune Bloggart: it’s the great part of Open Source after all. Nice Branching Metaphor In fact, at github.com/detro/bloggart you can find my branch of Bloggart, where I’m gradually pushing the new functionality I want/need. ...

September 9, 2010 Ā· 1 min Ā· 179 words

Hello World, again!

1 $ echo "Hello World!" This is my first post from a whole new backend. Yes, I’m leaving the underperforming and unreliable Bluehost Hosting for a scalable, distributed, load-balanced, reliable, powerful platform. I’m going Google. I’m moving to App Engine. To make App Engine serve my purpose, I picked a small, cute, interesting project to do the job: Bloggart, made by brilliant Arachnid (Nick Johnson). The old posts you ask? Yes, I’m working on a strategy for that. Most probably will work a bit on Bloggart to welcome my Wordpress’s data, and use the App Engine Bulk Loader. Of course, there will be quite few bumps on the way: Bloggart is not Wordpress. I’m sure there will be tons of features that will be left out. But Bloggart and App Engine suite my primary purpose: Speeeeeed. In fact, I recommend you take a good look at this series of article on Nick’s blog where he goes step-by-step through the development of his project: really cool stuff. ...

August 30, 2010 Ā· 1 min Ā· 181 words