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We seem to have made it.
The website is now hosted on different servers, at dreamhost.com.
Of course what could not be done was to resurrect the wiki, which now should instead be recreated from scratch. And, much worse, the mindmapping tool. The page from which it was possible to make a mind map of a delicious account. Right now I have unfortunately no time for much, as I am in the last months of my Ph.D., yet I hope to find at least the time to put back the program to make the mindmaps. So at least people will be able to make the mindmaps themselves. Apologise to all the spammers that sent me spam in the last 2 weeks. Knowing that all the latest comments were going to be lost anyway I avoided to mark them (about a thousand messages) as spam. Please don’t feel ignored, just sent your message again and I shall trash it asap.
Finally the time has come. Although I wanted to do this from a long time, only now did I found the time and the technical knowledge to do it:
I divided the blog.
I divided all the Italian posts from the English ones. I created a new blog at http://it.pietrosperoni.it, and my italian posts will, from now on, be posted over there. And only over there. Most of the people (3) who read me (5) either read Italian or English posts. And I am sure it must have been very confusing to scroll through a page and find some posts in English and some in Italian. Plus I always had the sensation that I could not write too much in one language, or possible readers of the other language will just assume the blog contains no information at all for them, and dismiss it. This in time made me slow down posting, as I could not always follow particular threads, that would have involved to post many times, in one language.
But now all this has come to an end.
Of course if you want to read entries from both blogs you should add the rss from the italian blog too. Some topic will remain confined to this blog (like tags, for example), others will remain there (like italian politics), while other will span through both medium (like diet, which already is present in both). The wiki in this case should act like a glue, creating a space where entries from both are aggregated. Plus, being a wiki, I (and whoever wants to come and play) will use it to keep notes, aggregate extra content, and generally make some pages stand out while others will only show the blogs entries, the bookmarks, and the context (i.e. the links from delicious popular page, and from technorati).
Generally it is not a smart idea to to come here every time to see if I have written something. I tend to write when I have something to say, so many days might pass before I say something, then for some days I might make one or more post a day. The solution is to add my rss feeds to your feed reader. Bloglines is a good one. I am sure there are better ones. Feel free to suggest them (as I am always looking for ways to improve).
Now let’s get a bit more technical: making this change also meant getting my hands dirty with MySql Continue reading The Italian blog is born: reasons and technicalities
I think it’s the time to present what have I been doing in the last days. A number of improvement have beed added to this web site. In short I have upgraded to wordpress 2.0. I also moved to the next version of wikka. Some of you might remember that I offered some money to whoever could write some code to get the tag plugin to generate an rss list. I didn’t, at the time, explained why. I will now.
WordPress 2.0 gives the possibility to start categories on the fly. Just adding them, by listing them. Essentially this makes the category in wordpress work like tags (or keywords, for academics). But categories in wordpress also have an rss feed connected to them. Albeit with some bugs, like linking to the whole blog and not to the particular category. So I passed most of the first of January adding to the entries the relative tags as categories. So now I have no need of an rss feed for the tag page, as the tag page has been substituted with the category pages.
You also will rememer that I installed Wikka. The wiki engine. Now wikka is not only open source but also easy source. It is so simple that even I could hack the code. That is very simple! So I changed the code and inserted the possibility to have default pages. In short if before if you were to look for the url http://wiki.pietrosperoni.it/someunexistingpage and there is no page in the wiki called “someunexistingpage” the result would be that the wiki would ask you to edit the page, and you would be redirected to http://wiki.pietrosperoni.it/someunexistingpage/edit.
Now he would create on the fly the page someunexistingpage with the default content. And the default content I chose was the 4 rss feeds:
- the feed from my blog from the category: someunexistingpage
- the feed from my technorati from the tag: someunexistingpage
- the feed from my delicious bookmarks from the tag…
- and the feed from the popular pages in delicious, always from that tag
So for each tag I now have a wiki page with the most relevant rss appearing there. But being a wiki page I also can add other rss feeds, write definitions, comments, todo lists. In short modify it as I see fit.
Still it is not perfect. As it writes the page the first time, from that moment the page is set. I can delete it, but I cannot, for example, change the default content for all the pages that only contain the default content. I tried to write a plugin to do that, but I failed when I confronted the fact that I needed to write a plugin {{defaultpage}} who should have activated other plugins:{{rrs}}, for example. Something that I ignored how to do.
Also having the same string to work for delicious (as tag), wordpress (as category name) and wikka (as pagename) puts some heavy constraints on what the string might contain. For example I am already running ashore for all the tags that contain a dot inside (aaargh, del.icio.us!) or an accented letter (aargh, dear italian).
If you want to see how the pages look like just see the idea page. But any link from the right column (provided they have no dots inside or accents) will work fine.
In those last days the blog has been up and down, on and off, all the time. It was my fault. I was trying to perfection something that was already ok. I was trying to use the mathml plugin. It is a pretty plugin, and provided that you only post math formulas, one formula per line, and nothing else; provided that everybody looks at them with your font unabled firefox last generation; provided that no one ever, under any circumstance (I’nt not kidding folks !) opens the blog with an I.E. … then it does pretty graphic which seem very very similar to the professional formula in professionist texts. Albeit generally less correct.
The fact is that this bloody plugin transform your html page into an xml page. So anything which is not ok, any little fart of any other plugin, any error you might have done 15 monts ago, any “com’on who bothers now”, “who will notice”, will come back and hunt you.
In my case I had to go through all the posts to clean them. Clean the <p> and the </p>; clean the <div> and the … yes you got it, the </div> clean the *gasp* <em> opened in one paragraph, and closed in another! All this just to make sure that I could read the 3 forumula (three) that I wrote in 15 months of blogging in a pretty format. Then today, as I was chatting with a friend bragging about my new found closeness with maths symbols, I discovered in horror that not only they were not rendered correctly on his machine (…of course, the ignorant did not have the pretty fonts), but no automatic message was telling him where to get the font, and IE was committing suicide upon sight of my page. That was too much, I inserted back the errors, undo my previous changes, and now I am going to disinstall mathml. I might make a pic of the formula and insert that instead, or make a small php popup page. But no Math Ml for this blog.
Sorry folks!
Thank you Math Ml,
it was nice until it lasted.
Pietro
Prima di tutto devo ringraziare pubblicamente Capitan Uncino per avermi disincagliato dalle secche che più e più volte hanno ostacolato la partenza.
Peter Pan
Welcome my son,
welcome to the machine
Pink Floyd
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