Louwrentius

This blog is just static HTML pages that are generated using Blogofile. The Blogofile website sports a small image gallery that has been written to illustrate how to create your own 'controllers' or Blogofile plugins.

My Python skills are horrible buy I managed to improve a bit on this example photo gallery. If you click on the 'Photos' menu at the top of this blog, you can see an example of the result.

What is the improvement?

• Basically one thing: it create a gallery by traversing recursively over a directory structure containing pictures.

How to install?

1. Just create a folder where you will store pictures.

2. Add this to your _config.py

photo_gallery = controllers.photo_gallery

photo_gallery.enabled = True

photo_gallery.path = "pictures"

1. put this file into _controllers/photo_gallery
2. enter into this gallery and create a symlink like:

ln -s photo_gallery.py __init__.py

1. download the example templates here.

Additional info

This photo gallery generator ignores symlinks. However, it looks for a special file name in every directory:

showcase.jpg

This file can be a symnlink to one of the photo's. It is used as the identifying picture for a folder with pictures. Every directory should contain at least a single showcase.jpg.

If you have a folder called Europe containing two sub folders England and France, you can create a showcase.jpg symlink to one of the underlying showcase files of one of the folders. This picture will then be used to 'identify' the "Europe" folder.

Example directory tree:

./Europe
./Europe/England
./Europe/England/London
./Europe/England/London/showcase.jpg
./Europe/England/showcase.jpg
./Europe/France
./Europe/France/Nice
./Europe/France/Nice/showcase.jpg
./Europe/France/showcase.jpg
./Europe/Netherlands
./Europe/Netherlands/Enkhuizen
./Europe/Netherlands/Enkhuizen/showcase.jpg
./Europe/Netherlands/showcase.jpg
./Europe/showcase.jpg
./USA
./USA/New York
./USA/New York/showcase.jpg
./USA/showcase.jpg

As stated in my previous post, I migrated all posts from blogger.com to my own host running blogofile. At the time of my previous post, I was not able to restore all comments made on my old blog. Thanks to some help from disqcus I fixed an error on my behalf and all old comments from my older blog appeared on the appropriate pages.

This completes the transition from blogger to blogofile and discus (for comments).

I'm now working on a controller for blogofile that recursively generates a static HTML photo blog. Relearning Python along the way. When working properly, the code will be made available so other people can at least have a good laugh.

This blog is now running on an old Intel based Mac Mini, also acting as a firewall.

Until now, I was hosting my blog on Google's blogger. I switched to using Blogofile. I wanted to have more control over my content and the layout.

I had many issues with the blogger blog post editor, resulting in ugly posts with too much white space, strange fonts and fonts sizes. Also, showing programming code examples with syntax highlighting is not possible with Blogger. As a nerd, I'm a control freak and I was not in control enough over my blog on blogger.

So I first started thinking about hosting my own wordpress site, but soon I concluded that this is not what I want. Wordpress has similar limitations as blogger and I no longer want to be depending on some special blog software without direct access to my content. So after a tip of a friend of mine I started to look at blogofile. Blogofile generates a static HTML website, which is a real benefit if you are hosting your own site. The most important benefits are:

• Security
• Performance
• Ownership

Security

Most websites get hacked because they are basically live applications accessible from the Internet. Applications can contain bugs. If it contains security related bugs, you are toast. Software like wordpress has an awful track record regarding security. Basically, if you are running a wordpress site, you must be in a state of constant fear. You also constantly have to upgrade to the latest version within a short time frame or you will be hacked. I think that wordpress is a security hazard.

Blogofile generates plain text static HTML web pages. There is no dynamic content and thus no program running, except for the web server itself. There is no serious security risk.

Performance

Plain text web sites are fast. It is just data. When a visitor requests some web pages, there is no application running, laying pressure on the CPU, just plain data transfers. I bet you could host this blog without much performance problems on a recent smart phone like an Android or iOS device.

Ownership

All content is stored in a text-only format that can always easily be transformed into some other format. I use markdown syntax to write new blog posts. But plain HTML can also be used. Comments can be posted through discus. It seems however that I will loose all existing comments of my original blog. New comments are showing up without a hitch, but existing imported comments do not show up. I do want to preserve them but how? I'm not sure yet. I'm thinking about incorporating them in my posts as an appendix.

The whole process of migrating to blogofile

All steps taken so far as to migrate away from blogger:

1. Create a wordpress installation
2. Export blogger blog.
3. Import blogger blog in wordpress installation
4. 'Import' the converted wordpress blog to blogofile 'format' using wordpress2blogofile.py
5. Hack, script and fight to change all URLs so they are correct for the new site.
6. hack, script and kill to get the old comments to show up, to no avail.
7. Learn markdown
8. Learn blogofile
9. Create + steal a new website design and have to learn css and html all over again.
10. Convert all posts from html to markdown.
11. Fix all converted posts where necessary
12. Put all external hosted content into a local folder and fix all links.