Time flies ...
... when you're having fun. This blog turned five a few days ago.

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Movable Type help needed
One of my favourite blogs has a broken rss/rdf syndication: No newlines, no parapgraphs, no indentation. Running Blosxom myself, I don't what could be wrong. If some knowledgeable source could send me a pointer, I'd gladly pass that along. Merely pointing out the error achieved naught so far, better be a little more constructive with a patch suggestion. So help would be welcome.

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Score tied at one all
Earlier today, and after reading Joerg Jaspert's rant on Debian Planet being at times too off-topic for him, I felt compelled to send him private mail as I happen to disagree with that point. Unfortunately, he and I didn't get much further than repeating our positions once over.

Back now at the computer, I just saw MJ Ray's riposte which I happen to, no surprise here, agree fully with. To me, one of the nicer aspects of Debian Planet is how it, at least occassionally, brings out the other, non-computing side of fellow Debianers. That is clearly not a bug but a feature.

Coincidentally, while running errands this afternoon, I listened to Chicago Public Radio (one of the very few remaining stations worth turning on) which carried an interview with a U of Chicago law prof on the origin of the word 'echo room'. His thesis is that people self-select themselves more and more into virtual communities. The main point here that these communities are all non-overlapping, so people simply reinforce prior beliefs and opinions as the only feedback they get is from people who, by virtue of the pre-selected, are likely to hold views very similar to their own.

Getting back to the prior topic, having non-Debian posts on planet.debian.net allows us to break the 'echo' pattern at least a little bit.

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Simple html mode for .txt file in blosxom tree?
So I made a blunder omitting a closing " earlier, and the post got an foobar'ed. Working in the one and only editor, I am wondering if someone had some elisp magic to turn html mode on for a file ending in .txt provided it sits below a configurable top-level directory, i.e. my blosxom directory?

Right now, and for kicks, I manually turned html mode on and off again as we don't formal document header for a blosxom input file. Better than nothing, but far from ideal.

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Now serving statically
Ok, finally switched over to static pages. As with many things blosxom, this was tremendously easy to set up. I am also splitting it between my normal workstation and the front-end webserver which now no longer needs to hold the blog entries.

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Some refreshments, please
Having played around with the css and wml code, the look of the pages is now a little more modern. Making the (dynamic) blosxom pages look like the rest of the (static) wml-generated pages was fairly simple: cut & paste some wml-generated output into the blosxom 'flavour' templates.

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Blogging with Blosxom
Having looked around for a suitable, preferable Free / Open Source, simple blogging system, having been tempted by the non-really Free Movable Type, I think I have now settled on blosxom which isn't bad. It will surely be a painful while til I have enough noteworthy content. Oh well. Gotta start someplace.

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