On Thu, Jan 28, 2010 at 8:19 PM, Chris G <cl@isbd.net> wrote:

On Thu, Jan 28, 2010 at 07:24:28PM +0000, Paul Grenyer wrote:

...

HI

On Thu, Jan 28, 2010 at 6:50 PM, James Elsey <james.elsey@gmail.com> wrote:

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When you come across an interesting article, or figure out how to do something with a new technology your messing around with, do you document it?

Yes. Not only for other poeple, but also so I can remember how to do it next time.

...

If anyone has a tech blog, feel free to link me up, would be interested to see what others are doing

I have a general blog that has technical content too: http://paulgrenyer.blogspot.com.

I normally document it on wordpress. I just like the way that it works and the admin GUI is more than adequate for me. It is all down to personal choice, which is another great thing about Linux of course, I just found the wiki way abit to much for what I was wanting, Drupal is the daddy as such, but once again too much stuff attached for me, I just like the plain aspects of wordpress for a simple site that I can document different things that I have interests in. My site is http://www.codingfriends.com btw. Paul congrats about the Daddy.. it is a great time :). I have a 3 year old and they just get more and more fun each day :). Ian

For notes and other stuff I don't use a blog at all as, to my mind, it's not time related and the backwards sequence of blogs always worries me.

What I have done is set up a hierarchy of directories where I write notes in reStructuredText and serve these using apache through a filter that converts the reStructuredText to HTML.

This means I can compose all the notes using my favourite editor in reStructuredText which is an easy to read format but can see them in the web browser with menus, trails, etc.

-- Chris Green

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On Thu, 28 Jan 2010 19:57:57 -0000 "Martin A. Brooks" <martin@antibodymx.net> allegedly wrote:

Sure do. In fact, I just spun up a wiki which I'll eventually transfer all my old HOWTOs to. Here's a HOWTO I wrote the other week:

http://hinterlands.org/wiki/index.php/DebianEximDovecotSquirrelmailSieve

That's useful - thanks. Though I'm a postfix fan myself. Mick --------------------------------------------------------------------- The text file for RFC 854 contains exactly 854 lines. Do you think there is any cosmic significance in this? Douglas E Comer - Internetworking with TCP/IP Volume 1 http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc854.txt ---------------------------------------------------------------------

On Sat, Jan 30, 2010 at 12:47:13AM +0000, MJ Ray wrote:

James Elsey <james.elsey@gmail.com>

...

I've gone for "Blogger", is there anything exciting Wordpress offers that could tempt me over? I'm using the web interface at the moment, its a bit clumsy, are there any good linux desktop applications that make it easier to type up and organise posts?

The most exciting things that Wordpress offers are better anti-spam tools (instead of Google's disability-discriminating and inappropriate-use-of-wheelchair-icon-using "visual verification") and it's free and open source software (FOSS). One benefit of being FOSS is that there is a choice of handy helpers like http://deepestsender.mozdev.org/ or those at https://addons.mozilla.org/ or applications like http://drivel.sourceforge.net/ and http://qtm.blogistan.co.uk/

I've just been setting up a WordPress site on my home server to see how it goes as a journal for keeping a project history on. I quite like it though it's a bit 'baroque'. I find that changing little bits of PHP inside it is actually more straightforward than I expected. However, as with nearly all 'server side' blogging tools the actual data entry (i.e. blog writing) interface is rather painful. With nearly all of them you have a choice of:- Real HTML - straightforward and relatively fast, but hardly conducive to an easy flow of thought onto the page unless you only write text with no headings, images or whatever. Tiny MCE (or similar) - A 'nearly WYSIWYG' editor which makes seeing what it looks like easier but is s-l-o-w in my experience. On WordPress for example it can't keep anywhere near my keyboard auto-repeat if I delete a string of characters so I always overshoot. MarkUp - You can get (for example) a reStructuredText plugin for WordPress but it rather produces the worst of both worlds as it's one more step from actually posting your thoughts and is still rather slow. I use mozex with Firefox so can use vi (vile in my case but vim for most of you I expect) to edit the contents of a textarea which overcomes some of the pain of text entry into WordPress (or whatever) but it's yet again one more step between entering your thoughts and actually getting them onto the blog. I'm also trying out (having tried it out once before and used it to develop something else) pyblosxom which uses ordinary text files for its blog storage. At its simplest it is *very* simple - you just put your text files in a directory hierarchy whose directory names become the categories of your blog and the mtimes of the files are used as the dates of the entries. So putting a new entry in the blog is just creating a file in the appropriate directory - done! There are quite a few add-ons available for pyblosxom, it's still being developed and supported (I'm currently having quite an active discussion on its mailing list) and it's written in python which for me is a big advantage. I'm using the reStructuredText plugin which allows me to write in reStructuredText with no extra steps (for me) pyblosxom simple understands that files with a .rst suffix are in reStructuredText and converts them to HTML before displaying them. (So no extra step like WordPress) -- Chris Green

On Wed, Feb 10, 2010 at 05:10:16PM +0000, Laurie Brown wrote:

James Elsey wrote:

...

When you come across an interesting article, or figure out how to do something with a new technology your messing around with, do you document it?

This is a bit of a generalised question, just trying to find out what you guys do.

I've gone for "Blogger", is there anything exciting Wordpress offers that could tempt me over? I'm using the web interface at the moment, its a bit clumsy, are there any good linux desktop applications that make it easier to type up and organise posts?

If anyone has a tech blog, feel free to link me up, would be interested to see what others are doing

A bit late on this one I know, but anyway...

We use dokuwiki extensively. It's really good, and designed for, well, documentation!

See: http://www.dokuwiki.org/dokuwiki

It's pretty customisable, and has made a real difference to the trials of creating and maintaining documentation for us and several customers.

Cheers, Laurie.

PS. I'm tech admin on a political blog too, based on wordpress (http://www.panscourer.com/). The more I work with wordpress, the more impressed I am with it. It's a fantastic example of truly worthwhile OSS.

I'm currently looking for something to document and record a personal project and I've homed in on blogs and wikis to do it. I've currently got *loads* installed on my system for trying out. At the moment I *think* Dokuwiki is the front runner, it's not perfect because it's not written in Python :-) but it has quite a lot else going for it. I've looked at WordPress and Pyblosxom on the blog side, both good but I've come to the conclusion that a wiki is nearer what I want than a blog. I also have moinmoin, twiki (and some others I've forgotten) installed. Twiki is too 'heavy' for my purposes, moinmoin is good and is the closest runner to Dokuwiki, it's a bit less polished, harder work to install, but it is written in Python. :-) -- Chris Green