Once again, the frequency of my blogging has become worse than erratic, and I largely blame this on my increasing distaste for both the aesthetic of my blog (which I have ideas about fixing), and the frustration of not being able to use my normal workflow to publish.

I am using Serendipity, a PHP blogging system, which is very good, but forces a web-based administrative interface. I would ideally be able to send email to a server and have it publish new entries for me. It should read the headers of the email for publication date and subject, the body of the email for the content of the post, and strip out both normal signatures and gpg signatures, and parse a line like tags: foo, bar, baz and tag entries with them.

I could certainly hack this into Serendipity, but I would really rather not.

I would like the software to be able to handle things like publishing the last n images from flickr, the last n tweets/identi.ca updates, etc, as well as blogish posts, longer articles and general content. I guess this places it as a combination of a CMS and Blogging tool. The email interface should be able to tell the difference between a new article and a new post, using something like type: blog or type: article, similar to the tagging instruction.

It has to be themable obviously, and finally, the most interesting point is that I want it to be written in a language I don't know, so that if I want to hack on it I have opportunity to learn something new. I think at this point my preference would be Python.

So dear lazyweb: do you have any suggestions for me?

Edit: 2 new requirements: the incoming mail handler should be able to check a gpg signature, and only import mail that has been signed by me. The UI should not require JS and instead use progressive enhancement techniques.

Have been broken for awhile, since I moved servers and upgraded s9y. For some reason the upgrade to 1.3.1 managed to forget to add a couple database columns. Eh, I guess that's what I get when I move servers, upgrade s9y, and postgres all at once (while chewing gum too, of course).

Anyway it's fixed now, thanks to rapid s9y.org developer help.

Finally! she.geek.nz has migrated to postgres. Mmmm, postgres...

If there's any odd behaviour, please tell me

Goodbye, hateful mysql. I won't miss you.

If anyone is interested in how I did this to serendipity, here's a copy of what I wrote to the s9y list

My mother was complaining about how hard she finds it to read my website, so I have re-themed it.

Let me know if there are any bugs.

The header image rotates. They're all variations on me.

I have upgraded to the latest version of serendipity. Please let me know if you find any issues.

In particular, I have locked down comment and trackbacks, as I was getting a lot of spam.

I will be doing some more upgrades over the next week or so as I have time.

I'm doing stuff to this website. Expect brokenness and plain text maintenance pages.

Well, the formal part anyway. We're now drinking and I'm finally plugged in. My laptop and phone both ran out of batteries at a very crucial and worst possible moment.

So the highlights were definitely Douglas Bowman, Joel Spolsky, and Darren Fittler, who happened to be the first three.

The Firefox guy, Ben Goodger was interesting, mostly because I was really interesting in the content of his presentation.

Tony Chor on IE 7 was also really good, I found myself walking away thinking IE 7 didn't sound too bad and then having to smack myself in the head. He was very, very clever and managed to establish an instant rapport with the audience, by this very clever self deprecating humour. The cynic in me says that it was all contrived, but that may be just a little too evil.

So I'm all motivated to redo this website and I have been struggling again with getting a s9y svn -> git import, which I now seem to have managed. I'm writing a script to get the data out of mysql and into postgres for going forward, because mysql makes me want to kill things. When I have done this, I will definitely be making it available to other s9y users.

I hate most of this website again already (after only a year), I need to:

~ merge with whatever the latest s9y stable is;
~ make it pretty;
~ make it do something a little more exciting that forces me to update it with less boring shit more often.
~ redo the gallery. Or at least put vaguely recent photos there. I think a random photo side block would be quite cool.

Maybe I will try and find some time to do these things on the weekend. Sigh..

Instead of being useful and getting ready to go to work, I have finished tagging, and I think the tagging sidebar is interesting, especially considering that debconf and election2005 are all over red rover.

Anyway, categories have been deleted, so if you were subscribed to a per category rss feed, I guess you're screwed. Sorry! Well, it's my blog and I reserve the right to completely change it at will. Nyah.

I've installed a new plugin, freetag, which means that I will probably get rid of categories and just use tagging instead. This means I will be retroactively tagging (retrotagging?) past entries, which means my rss feed is going to asplode. I've already started this so if you're hearing about things that happened a while ago, sorry!

I guess when I manage to get s9y into git happily I'll upgrade to 0.9 too, but that sounds like effort and I am lazy and have christmas shopping to do instead.

the sun is on my bed and I'm drinking my coffee and reading while waiting for darwinports to install subversion-perlbindings for me so I can import serendipity 0.9 into git to make upgrading (and further customisation) easier.

I can see that I'm going to become completely obsessed with it. Damn that Ben Brown.

It's made me think about tags though. I wonder if I can convince s9y to do tagging. Maybe in 0.9. I should merge it in anyway and the other day I found a bug that I can probably fix. I quite like the tagging thing, especially when you get a sidebar with words and some of them are in bigger fonts, presumably due to the number of recent entries with that tag. See elgg: Fresh on our minds for an example.

I guess I could just write one.

My eyes hurt today. The proportion of brokenness/normality is not in my favour.

I've upgraded serendipity to 0.8.4. Hope this hasn't caused any problems. Please tell me if anything strange happens.

Success! I have managed to find the time to install and hack to pieces, serendipity. Now to find the time for continued updating.

Now is not the time an extended entry though, it's go to work late time. More later.