Launch of new blog

A while ago I started to think that my webpage was a little bit drab looking and lacked the any comment system. So I started to look into how people was doing it nowadays and even briefly considered writing my own system (horror!). Luckily I quickly realized that it was a pretty large project which I didn't particularly wanted to take on. I just wanted a simple system that could satisfy my needs of a comment system and easy to maintain...

As luck has it I got to as Noel about what he used and he mentioned Movable Type, which looked great. I started to install it on my server and play around with it.

HTML is dead...

The first thing I discovered was that all that I though I knew about html and web publishing was hopelessly outdated. I still wrote HTML 1.0, that was what I learned in college where you wrote homepages like "Hi my name is Jim, here are a couple of links:"... Today it seems like everyone is using CSS with HTML 4. Writing these new pages proved to be a lot of troubles for me since I'm moving over my development environment from my apple box to my windows box (horror!). The one thing I had really neatly setup from my apple box was a small shell script that automatically updated everything from my local server to the published server through rsync+ssh. Rsync on windows proved to be another story, at least if you want a secure line to pipe through. I tried for quite a while to get rsync and putty to work together, but in vain. Admitting defeat, now it's just plain old ftp until the time when I have enough energy to resume the autoupdate script. Gah!

Pictures, how hard can it be?

Pictures, without them the webpage definitely looks a little bit drab. I admit, there are not that many on mine but the one I have was conceived through hard work. Maybe a little too hard. Hopefully you are reading this in either Safari or Firefox1, but it was not so easy to get the picture which is the banner to be that nice alpha blended goodness that it is. I simply don't have any tool that can do that. So what is a poor programmer to do? After about an hour of futile clicking in various image processing programs I gave up and just downloaded Python Imaging Library, wrote a small script that added the alpha gradient for me to the PNG and Bob's your uncle, I had a banner.

In closing.

Anyways, this is my new site where I'll hopefully in the future post more articles and you as a reader can say what you think about it.

Footnotes:

1 If you're (horror) reading through internet explorer you should really consider switching since (as you've seen) the rendering engine just doesn't cut the mustard.

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