At Canon­i­cal's On­line Ser­vices we can do cool stuff on fri­days. We do cool stuff all week, ac­tu­al­ly, but on fri­days we can do cra­zier cool stuff.

So, to­day, I ripped off a great ser­vice of­fered by http://­calepin.­co and im­ple­ment­ed a pro­to­type blog-through-Ubun­tu-One web ap­pli­ca­tion. Of course, it's pow­ered by Niko­la,

The code is ab­so­lute non­sense, and it needs to be looked at by some­one who un­der­stands Djan­go, OAu­th, OpenID, and pro­gram­ming in gen­er­al bet­ter than I do, but hey, it does work (for a very loose def­i­ni­tion of "work").

It's called Shore­ham and no, you can't have it yet.

As a teaser, here's a video. With a pony.

In the near fu­ture I will do a bet­ter post about this ex­plain­ing the code, etc.

Al­va is al­most the op­po­site of Niko­la. If Niko­la is about mak­ing stat­ic sites, Al­va is a dy­nam­ic site. How­ev­er, as Hegel sug­gest­s, from the the­sis and the an­tithe­sis comes the syn­the­sis.

So, Al­va is about dy­nam­i­cal­ly cre­at­ing stat­ic sites. If you want to have Niko­la in your serv­er in­stead of in your own com­put­er, and have the con­ve­nience of an on­line tool, that's the niche Al­va tries to fil­l.

So, you would in­stall Al­va, and use it like any oth­er we­b-based blog­ging tool. Yet, be­hind the sce­nes, you would have Niko­la, and all the per­for­mance and se­cu­ri­ty ben­e­fits of stat­ic sites.

And maybe some­day, I (or some­one) will put up a mul­ti­-us­er ver­sion of Al­va, and you will be able to get host­ed blogs, know­ing all the da­ta is yours and you can leave any­time and do your own thing.

This is very very ear­ly stages. So ear­ly it does not work yet. But here's a teaser:

There is no firm time­frame for this, it de­pends on a ton of oth­er stuff and may not even hap­pen.

Span­ish on­ly!

Ay­er Jorge Lanata, que siem­pre me cayó bi­en, y a quién siem­pre acom­pañé en sus aven­turas ed­i­to­ri­ales (¡­Com­pré su li­bro de re­latos! ¡Ex­traño Críti­ca! ¡Me gusta­ba Silv­ina Chediek!) di­jo una pelo­tudez bas­tante im­por­tante.

Lo chi­canearon con apli­car­le no sé que mul­ta por fu­mar en un es­tu­dio de tele­visión, lo que es­tá pro­hibido por ley. En­tonces hi­zo un berrinche y di­jo "voy a de­jar de fu­mar cuan­do ust­edes de­jen de ro­bar", segui­do de ex­pli­ca­ciones de có­mo él no le hace mal a nadie, etc etc.

Supong­amos que no le hace mal a nadie. Supong­amos que "el­los" roban y no paran. ¿Y? ¿Qué pasa? No pasa nada, ex­cep­to que Lana­ta se da el gus­to de no ten­er que parar de fu­mar dos ho­ras. No hace ningu­na difer­en­cia ex­cep­to para él. Y mien­tras tan­to seguiría rompi­en­do la ley, que es tan ley co­mo la que pro­híbe ro­bar, ya que es­ta­mos.

De­cir esa boludez que di­jo Lana­ta es co­mo hac­er una huel­ga de mor­fi, o sea lo op­uesto de una huel­ga de ham­bre. Es prom­e­ter no pren­der­se fuego has­ta que los yan­quis se vayan de Viet­nam, es prom­e­ter com­erse un chori to­dos los días has­ta que el Ti­bet sea li­bre, es com­er en­sal­a­da de cetáceo has­ta que se sal­ven las bal­lenas.

Si uno se va a pon­er en adalid de la éti­ca (cosa que yo tra­to de no hac­er porque es un laburo jo­di­do, jus­ta­mente), no puede dar pie, no puede de­jar­la pi­can­do, porque si la de­ja servi­da se la man­dan a guardar. Lanata, la de­jás servi­da. Largá el pu­cho. Pen­sá un ra­to. De­spués crit­icá.

I did some work today to get Nikola properly packaged. This involves some minor changes on the workflow for site authors. I am not 100% sure I have it right yet, so here is a short video showing how it works right now in the packaging branch I am doing.

The new thing is the nikola init foldername command, the rest is all old stuff. Basically, you stop having a full copy of Nikola for each site and everything is in a centralized location.

You can still do your own themes by putting them in themes/themename and add new tasks, files, etc. The configuration dodo.py is unchanged except for the "magic bit" which is slightly different.

So, not re­al­ly in­va­sive, easy to mi­grate to, and en­ables much eas­i­er up­dates in the fu­ture, as long as we don't break any im­por­tant stuff in a non-­com­pat­i­ble way.

Here is the video: