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A scene from Ireland

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Improved support for comments

A couple of people actually left comments (woo-hoo!!).
This helped me see a number of problems with the comment feature. So I've fixed some things.

  • A default title for the comment gets filled in.
  • I get mail when people submit comments.
    BULLET - People can leave an email address and subsequent comments on the same article will get sent to them. Of course they can edit their comment and remove the email address.

I still need to record and display the date/time when the comment was made, and maybe even make an 'atom' feed of comments....

Blog thoughts

No entries for several months... Why? Maybe I just lost the urge.. or maybe there is something more.

I am a person who is keen on structure. Not everything I do it totally structured, but where structure exists I like to find and make use of it. The thing about a blog is it is largely unstructured. It it just a time-ordered series of thoughts. I think that is great, but I would like there to be extra structure as well.

Sometimes different blog entries at different times are connected by a theme. That connection should be made apparent somehow. But this blog doesn't let me.

So I tried creating sub-blogs (look over on the right hand side) but there didn't really get anywhere.

So where next?

Ideas for Aether

I've just installed aether-1.4 for this website and made a few enhancements that I might submit one day.

They include allowing a blog to select entries from another blog based on tags in the [entry] field. Thus my page has a News section which contains all items from my front page that mention 'raid' in the entry tag.

Also a blog can show just a list of pages (or the summaries there-of), so my page is now a blog of precisely three other pages. These are sorted by modify time.

Other changes I am contemplating include:

  • Once a password has been typed in, the "Edit" and "New" links at the bottom of the page become simple links that contain the password. This way I only need to type the password once. There would need to be an easy way to forget the password of course
    BULLET - Almost all my aether usage is using it as an error document, so the meaningless "me" doesn't appear. But when I edit a page it has to use a real URL, as you cannot post to an error document (I think). The "post" should pass in the preferred prefix so that when I come out of editing, I am back in the error-document space. (Does that make sense to anyone but me).

Aether now my home page

I've taken the plunge and made aether my home page.

This required a few modifications to aether so that it could appear as though aether controls the whole name space, but so that pre-existing links still work. You can find the patch I used at , either in the applied directory if it is still applied to my source, or in the included directory if it has been included unstream.

I hope to eventually move all the content which sensibly can be moved into aether across into aether. Until then, my original home page is still available.

Aether for blogging

Well, I've been thinking for a while that I should do something more interesting with my home page, and while I was flipping through the latest fresh meat I discovered Aether which claims to be both simple and competent at managing web pages and blogs. So I though I would give it a try.

My Debian notebook already had python installed, so I followed the instructions and it just worked, except that I needed to remove group-write permission before apache would run it setuid as me.

Whether this whole 'blog' idea will actually work for me I have no idea - I have a tendancy to get excited about something for a while and then loose interest. If that happens here, I guess it isn't meant to be.