network - JDobbelstein.dev()

Monday, July 26 2010

A port system for DotClear

By Johan on Monday, July 26 2010, 18:36

For the ones who favor their command line interface over graphical terminals, here comes a bundle of Makefiles and scripts to easily publish new entries on a DotClear2 blog with XML-RPC enabled.

It is loosely based on *BSD ports and the idea behind static blog generators like jekyll, which in fact I've never used so the comparison might be more about what I think they are and what I'd like to use. Nevertheless, the few features I have aimed for are:

automation, otherwise I would not waste whole days on the command line
integration with VIM, the text editor
pure text files, a very simple and universal way to store data. Moreover ones can manage the whole damned thing with Git.
extensible, as in the Unix philosophy where you combine a myriad of small programs to achieve your task

The project is available on GitHub.

Friday, July 16 2010

First attempt with SVG

By Johan on Friday, July 16 2010, 19:35

(SVG source)

SVG diagrams are scalable. They should be a perfect fit for this elastic CSS theme. Let's try.

Monday, May 10 2010

Managing mails the Unix way

By Johan on Monday, May 10 2010, 15:14

I am quite allergic to modern email programs such as Microsoft Outlook, KMail, Evolution or Thunderbird. After digging the web for a mail program that "sucks less", I've adopted mutt. In the same time, I've learned a lot of (not so useful) stuff about the email flow from servers to servers to servers to my brave old Unix mailbox. I am now using a split set of software to manage my emails. This could be confusing at first sight, but eventually I get the so-called do-one-thing-but-do-it-right quality of Unix systems. To summarize it, my messages go through the following path:

                         .--.               
                     _ -(    )- _           
                .--,(            ),--.      
            _.-(                       )-._ 
           (           INTERNET            )
            '-._(                     )_.-' 
                 '__,(            ),__'     
                      - ._(__)_. -          
                ^                      |
                |                      |
                |                      v
           .---------.           .-----------.
encryption | stunnel |           |  getmail  | deliver
           '---------'           '-----------'
                ^                      |
                |                      |
                |                      v
           .---------.           .----------.
      send | postfix |           | procmail |  filter
           '---------'           '----------'
                ^                      |
                |                      |
                |                      v
            .------.              .---------.
read/write  | mutt |<============>| dovecot |  store
            '------'              '---------'

Getmail, procmail, dovecot, mutt, postfix and stunnel. That's 6 programs to do what your Microsoft Outlook or Thunderbird do. But I can assure you that the former 6 programs offer a better experience compared to the latter ones.

Sunday, May 2 2010

A new version for the "Deep Blue" DotClear theme

By Johan on Sunday, May 2 2010, 23:40

After three whole nights and more than 30 cups of tea, my blog is using a new version of my "deep blue" theme. Key new features are:

Elastic CSS, this implies no more bitmap pictures :(
Refactoring of DotClear2 template to shift the center of the page to the left. This leaves a small opening for a side image on the right. This is a new proof that my poor CSS skills cannot overcome the xHTML tags and document structure of the original DotClear2 pages.
After many thoughts on the right CSS layout, I choose to use a CSS width based on em. Layouts based on page percent width are very tricky when it comes to displaying lines of code because text lines could be wrapped. CSS em attribute should garantee a similar appearance among screens and, let's dream, browsers. New pages width should be almost/at least 80 characters long. This might keep a text layout constant, even if you are zooming in/out, even if you are using different font sizes. Too wide or too big screens will be under-used. I don't care, use the space left to play with tiling window managers. Too small screens will have to go full screen and zoom out. Anyway if you cannot read 80 characters-long-line text, you should use another graphical terminal. (note: in fact, and perhaps due to limitation on the fonts, the length of text lines will never be constant. I've just tried to assure a minimal quality. See the next section for a concrete example)
Experimenting the CSS3 property rgba(r,g,b,alpha) to add some eye candy.
Experimenting another CSS3 property with the background-size declaration to scale the background image to full page height. Strangely browsers like Opera zoom both text and images, this can lead to unesthetic result.

one attachment

JDobbelstein.dev()

The wonderful world of computer programming › network

A port system for DotClear

First attempt with SVG

Managing mails the Unix way

A new version for the "Deep Blue" DotClear theme

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