Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry. I decided to change to wordpress’ pretty-URLs mode, and it changed the feed URL, which I was not expecting, and which I think is fundamentally borken.
I’ve moved my blog to WordPress, which will allows you to comment on my posts.
I guess it’s a sad day for DIYBlog, but hey, it was just a workaround until I got some web space that supported PHP.
Happy interaction!
When I wrote DIYBlog it occurred to me that what I was writing would translate into a blog aggregator pretty easily, and so I’m working on making that so. I’d like to start a little community of Java developers who are working on small free and open source software Java programs, so we can start to communicate through our blogs and help each other out with thorny issues e.g. how to get our programs working with an all free software systems (more on that later).
For the moment I’m working on aggregating my own favourite feeds, which you can see here: Planet Andy. All this is/will be running on pure FTP web space, with a little cron job running on my own machine to keep it updated. Of course, that does mean it only works when my machine is turned on…
I’ve made a page about how I’m making this blog, here: DIYBlog. I may even get around to putting it on freshmeat at some point, and if others want to contribute I may even put it on SourceForge.
I think I’ve managed to work out a system to make RSS work. Basically I write my blog entries into a raw RSS file, and then run a little Python script to add ids, links etc. and generate an HTML page from that. It’s been a hassle to write (mainly due to timezones, which I’ve now decided to ignore) and if anyone’s interested in some highly-customisable blogging software that only requires FTP on your web host, get in touch, especially if you’re the kind of person who thinks its cool to hand-code your RSS.
I really should provide an RSS feed. Does anyone know of a good reference on the simplest form of RSS that I can use to auto-generate some RSS from the HTML of this page? I’m prepared to do a little python coding to make it happen. Give me an email if so.
Speaking of giving me an email, wouldn’t it be great if I could have a proper blog that allowed comments? Well, I’d need a web host that allowed PHP or something, and that would cost money. If anyone knows of a good free hosting service (built on Free Software, preferably) let me know. I’ve registered on advogato.org but although I have finally managed to work out how to post to a blog, it doesn’t allow comments, so the only benefit it offers is an RSS feed, and the lack of control is not worth that to me yet. I may get frustrated with my home-grown HTML/FTP solution, but for the moment I’m quite enjoying it.
I’ve decided to start writing a blog, not least to convince people that although my work on open source projects (especially FreeGuide) has slowed down, it has not slipped out of my mind. Quite the opposite: I’m finding my lack of time very frustrating, especially when the train journey in to work every day gives me time to think of lots of excellent ideas, none of which I am going to be able to put into practice. I’ll log them here, and maybe someone else will do them. If not, I’ll do them when I retire.
I’m hoping to keep this blog as technical as possible, with only occasional daliances into personal matters, since it does my head in to be reading something like Planet Gnome and have to read about people’s cats being sick etc.