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frugal technology, simple living and guerrilla large-appliance repair

Regular blog here, 'microblog' there

Many of my traditional blog post live on this site, but a great majority of my social-style posts can be found on my much-busier microbloging site at updates.passthejoe.net. It's busier because my BlogPoster "microblogging" script generates short, Twitter-style posts from the Linux or Windows (or anywhere you can run Ruby with too many Gems) command line, uploads them to the web server and send them out on my Twitter and Mastodon feeds.

I used to post to this blog via scripts and Unix/Linux utilities (curl and Unison) that helped me mirror the files locally and on the server. Since this site recently moved hosts, none of that is set up. I'm just using SFTP and SSH to write posts and manage the site.

Disqus comments are not live just yet because I'm not sure about what I'm going to do for the domain on this site. I'll probably restore the old domain at first just to have some continuity, but for now I like using the "free" domain from this site's new host, NearlyFreeSpeech.net.

Sun, 28 Feb 2016

Update on the Counter addin, version 3, for Ode sites

I've been working on and off on the next version of the Counter addin for Ode sites.

The last update added counts of photos in the blog's filesystem to the original counts of entries with breakouts for traditional blog entries and social updates (basically counting everything in the whole documents directory and the updates directory, then using a little math.

I used the File::Find CPAN module as the backbone of the addin.

The next thing I wanted to do, also using File::Find, was to crawl the blog's filesystem and generate a categories list that can be displayed on the site.

So I've been playing with File::Find, Perl regular expressions and arrays.

I am able to generate an array made up of every directory that contains Ode posts, and I'm working on the regex to make the HTML and display text look exactly the way I want.

At this point I have a pretty good looking array, and I'm ready to move the Categories code (which I'm developing in a local directory with a "dummy" filesystem) into the main Counter addin code.

There are still some issues to work out, but as soon as I get the next version of the Counter addin ready, I will make it available for download and also hopefully have it on Github.