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.

I decided to add some social-sharing buttons to my Ode site. It's easy to do with code from the sites themselves and tags generated by the Ode script.

I decided to do Twitter and Google Plus share (I could have chosen "+1" but thought "share" was better sine you don't have to "like" it to share it). I could have done Facebook, too, and I might, but for now it's just these two.

I placed the code in the post_footer section of my main Logic (i.e. html) theme's page.html file.

It goes below this part:

<div class="post_footer">
    <p>Posted:  ,  : </p>

And above the permalink/Disqus embed code:

<p><a href="">permalink</a> | <a href="https://stevenrosenberg.nfshost.com/blog/ode/2013_1205_ode_social_buttons#disqus_thread" data-disqus-identifier="/ode/2013_1205_ode_social_buttons">comments</a></p>

Here is the code I'm putting between those two parts of page.html:

<p>
    <!-- Google Share button -->
    <script src="https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js"></script>
    <div class="g-plus" data-action="share" data-annotation="bubble" data-href=""></div>

    <!-- Twitter share button -->
    <a href="https://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-url="" data-text="" data-lang="en">Tweet</a>
    <script>!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs");</script>
</p>

That generates the two social-sharing buttons you see at the bottom of this entry. Can you see how I used Ode-generated tags to specify the permalink for both embeds and the title text for Twitter?

There's still more to do, but I have enough hacks roughed in to flip the switch on the responsive version of my Ode site.

Thanks to Hans Fast who did most of the work on this here and here.

I'll detail what changes I made to my main Ode theme's HTML and CSS in a near-future post (which I'm already working on).

Responsive design is a big thing for me. It was easy to do in Ode -- and easier thanks to hints from Hans. I still have quite a few elements in Ode's main Logic theme to work on, and I'll knock them down as I get the time to do it.

Thanks once again to Hans Fast for his code, and to Rob Reed for shipping such good code to start with in Ode.

Recent changes:

I tried to code the CSS so the "desktop" layout is what you see in tablets as well. I continue to think that most web sites, including this one, look pretty good on the standard 10-inch tablet (like a full-size iPad), and having sidebars pushed to the bottom is unnecessary on those devices.

So I simplified part of the CSS to make the site stay "normal" until 400px in screen width instead of 800px.

I also made some changes in sidebar behavior. When the screen is small, the sidebar not only goes to the bottom of the page, its text goes from float: right to float: left, and the colored image overlay on the sidebar disappears.

I've been meaning to roll the rest of the posts in my FlatPress blog centered on Debian into this Ode site.

In the past, I've moved quite a few of them in here, but there were about 30 or so from the early days of the FlatPress blog that I had yet to move.

I plowed through about 20 today and have 17 more to go. Rather than taking HTML source from FlatPress, I'm copy/pasting regular text from the FlatPress blog into text files and using Markdown to re-create the links and bolding.

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