I am the ghost of groovymother.com. Woooooo!

You’re not going to care about any of this…

… but I’ve spent a Saturday night working on this stuff, so I’m going to share.

I’ve spent the evening getting groovymother.com up and running on a new VPS box from VPSLink.

Of potential interest to other nerds is the fact that the whole shebang is now running Apache-free. The Django app that powers the site runs under the coroutine-tastic Spawning. In front of that, and serving static files, is the still-sexy nginx.

The Spawning processes are started and managed by Supervisor, which also takes care of running and monitoring the jobs that pull in feeds and grab screenshots.

All in all, a tremendously productive, if really rather sad, Saturday night.

Good Feedkeeping

I made a couple of tweaks to my Atom feed earlier this week, which regular readers should be made aware of:

1. In the spirits of saving duplicity, my main feed no longer contains my Flickr photos. If you still want to follow my photos, you should either subscribe to my Flickr photostream feed, or add me as a contact on Flickr and subscribe to your Photos from your contacts feed.
2. Finally addressing frequent requests, there is now a link within my link posts to the original item—that link being the mini screenshot. Should save you having to click through to my site.

You may now carry on about your business.

Commentary

Since 99% of what I write here is now in the category of “links” rather than posts, and at the prodding of Mike, I’ve added the ability to comment on links on the site.

Turned out to be about 2 new lines of code and minor templatery tweaks (Thank you Django!)

Go crazy, gang. Feedback-me-do!

Do The Write Thing

Comments are now live once more. Nothing fancy like OpenID or whatnot, but enough so you can tell me where to stick it.

Theoretically, I could enable comments on posted links, rather than just posts. Anyone got any interest in that?

The not-particularly-secret Diary of…

If you’re reading this, then I’ve thrown the switch. After almost five years on Movable Type, I’ve shifted over to some homespun blogging software (which I’ve codenamed threequarters)

The reason for this? Over the last few years, the MovableType “community” has pretty much dried up. While there are still a few souls pushing out plugins, they’re of decreasing quality and usefulness. When you only know enough Perl to be dangerous, hacking around in code to fix the authors’ bugs isn’t much fun, and prevented me from really building anything myself.

So here I am on a site powered by the lovely Django framework. There’s less than 500 lines of my code (templates excepted) powering the whole thing, and very little copying and/or pasting. Finally, I can do crazy things like including my Flickr photos in-line with my main blog entries, all cross-referenced by tags. Madness, I know!

It’s all still a little rough round the edges. There’s probably some Unicode screwups, images might not show up correctly, and I’ve yet to think about comments. But at least now I understand the programming language, and can fix all those things.

Happy new year, everyone!