Changing fonts in Ode is as easy as changing the .css file in the theme(s) you are using.

I've been having some trouble in Fedora with the Arial font, which looks like hell. The Wine non-emulator that runs Windows software in Linux brought an Arial font into my system, and it's just plain ugly.

I started looking at Arial and Helvetica not just in Linux but in Windows, too, and I decided that I don't like either one very much.

So I went into my CSS and killed out Helvetica Neue and Arial. Now Verdana and sans-serif, in that order, are the default fonts.

Looks better, I think.

There is a new Ode-running site out in the wild. Announced on the existing Surface Markup blog is the Surface Markup development blog, which has one of the nicest themes I've ever seen on an Ode site. It's minimal, beautiful and responsive.

Designer/writer Hans Fast helped me make this site responsive, and I continue to thank him.

In my Ode system running on an Apache web server, I'm "exposing" the existence of the /documents directory by stashing HTML there for my site archive.

Normally only text files and images live in that directory, and Ode uses them to produce the HTML pages it serves out of another directory.

I'm not crazy about exposing the contents of directories that don't, for the most part, serve HTML. So I decided to disallow directory listings on my Ode site with this line in .htaccess:

Options -Indexes

Now my readers can see http://stevenrosenberg.net/documents/archive.html but not http://stevenrosenberg.net/documents and the entire structure under that.

Even if I do decide to move my archive file to another directory (and I am seriously thinking about doing that), it still seems like a good idea to block access to the "raw" directories in Apache.

I've been messing around with scripting, and I created a static Ode archive page that lists every entry on this site.

I hacked it quickly. It needs some work. I think this would work better as a full-on Ode extension. For that I'd have to write it in Perl and figure out how Ode add-ins work. It could also be an extension of the Indexette add-in.

I'll be thinking about how to do this.

I decided to script my blog updates via a Bash script for Unix/Linux that runs both my Unison sync and the Indexette reindexing necessary to to make those entries live.

You're probably not running Unison like I am (and I still need to write up my Unison tutorial), but the reindexing line is worth sharing because I find it very useful to reindex the blog without using the web browser.

First of all, you need to install wget on your Unix/Linux system. It's available in just about every distribution. Use your favorite package manager to install it.

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That title sounds like a bad master's thesis, right?

What I'm trying to do here is see how Ode posts that get their Indexette tagging locally play with my Unison sync setup.

If Ode doesn't "touch" the pre-tagged files on the server, I think we're all good.

Minutes later: That works. Now to code up a way to drop in the Indexette tag with system-generated current date and time.

Weeks later: I did write the code in the form of a short Perl script, and I incorporated it into the Gedit text editor via the Snippets plugin. I will detail this in a future post.

I took a look back today, and I learned that I started using Ode as my main blogging platform two years and 9 months ago. Call it "nearly three years," because that makes for a nice headline.

I suppose I could wait three months and write this post then. I'll probably do that, too.

But for today, I'd like to thank Rob Reed for all the care and feeding he has put into Ode over the years and all the help he's given me and the others who have used this software.

While Perl-powered CGI is as old as the hills, Ode does blogging in a way that is very satisfying for me. I'd rather write Markdown-tagged text files on my local machine and move them over to the server than work through a web interface (though Ode has one of its own in the form of the terrific EditEdit addin, which I do use on occasion).

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There's something about Twitter. It's so easy to tweet out links, to retweet, to have 140-character discussions ...

But it's a bit harder to bring those conversations into your own blog in a more permanent fashion.

What I'm thinking about doing doesn't seem all that hard. It could be a browser-based program -- maybe a Firefox add-in -- that takes a tweet and plows that text (with links to the original tweet) into an Ode post, so anything I write, retweet, or just want to offer up can appear in my own blog without a whole lot of trouble.

It could also be a Perl script (or Javascript, or Python, or Bash) that outputs HTML to paste into a file.

I'll be thinking about this ...

One of the biggest things that keeps me using a system like Ode for blogging is the freedom to write entries on my local machine using any text editor I wish. Those text files turn into blog entries, and I never have to write in a web interface unless I want to (and for that we have the excellent EditEdit add-in).

I've written local files and pushed them via FTP, opened up my web-server space via sftp in my local Linux file manager (either Thunar with Xfce or Nautilus with GNOME) and now synced a local directory with my server via Unison.

I also love using Markdown. It eliminates much of the HTML-coding drudgery that's even part of mainstream blogging applications like WordPress.

But more than anything, when you can create a text file, write it in the editor of your choice, which for me is Gedit, and then have that file somehow make its way to the server and become part of a blog, it makes the process that much more enjoyable.