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Taking on the Dead (Famished #1)

Cover for Taking on the Dead (Famished #1)

Review:

A zom­bie book as writ­ten by Danielle Steele? There seem to be huge plot holes, which I will not ar­gue here to avoid spoil­ing stuff.

Not hor­ri­ble, but not my cup of tea, and will not fol­low the tril­o­gy.

Nikola 5.2 released!

I am thrilled to an­nounce that you can now down­load Niko­la 5.2. a new ver­sion of my stat­ic blog/site gen­er­a­tor.

What's new in this ver­sion? A LOT. Don't let the mi­nor ver­sion tick fool you, this ver­sion is packed with good­ness. Let's start with fea­tures:

You can eas­i­ly em­bed more con­tent:

  • New vimeo di­rec­­tive for re­struc­­tured tex­t.

  • Cus­­tom "gist" di­rec­­tive pro­vid­ing re­Struc­­tured text sup­­port for GitHub gist­s.

You can write your con­tent in al­most any markup:

  • Tex­tile markup sup­­port.

  • Cre­ole Wi­­ki markup sup­­port.

  • tx­t2­­tags markup sup­­port.

  • bb­­code markup sup­­port.

  • And of course, it still sup­­ports re­Struc­­tured tex­t, Mark­­down and HT­M­L.

More lan­guages:

  • New Catalá tran­s­la­­tion

  • New pol­ish tran­s­la­­tion.

  • New Sim­­pli­­fied Chi­­nese tran­s­la­­tion.

  • Use mul­ti­lin­gual Dis­­qus (although it does­n't seem to work)

You can im­port your data:

  • New Blog­ger/Blogspot im­­porter

  • Much im­proved Word­­press im­­porter

  • Ex­­tract meta­­da­­ta from file­­name by us­ing reg­­exp (help­­ful for im­­port­ing from oc­­to­­press or oth­­er sys­tem­s).

You can do fanci­er and more con­fig­urable sites:

  • One-­­page, dy­­nam­ic-load­­ing, clien­t-ren­dered site plug­in (task_­­mus­­tache)

  • Re­cur­­sive post/s­­to­ry fold­ers

  • New COM­­MENTS_IN_­­GAL­­LERIES and COM­­MENTS_IN_S­­TO­RIES op­­tion­s.

  • Lo­­cal search based on Tipue (ex­­tra_­­plu­g­in­s/­­task_lo­­calsearch)

  • Added com­­ments to im­age gal­­leries

  • New op­­tion RSS_TEASERS

  • New STO­RY_IN­DEX op­­tion to gen­er­ate in­­dex.html in sto­ry fold­er­s.

  • Add mul­ti size fav­i­­con sup­­port.

You can use Python 2.6 or high­er ... in­clud­ing Python 3. The on­ly miss­ing bit for full Python 3 sup­port is Google sitemap gen­er­a­tion.

And of course, a lot of bugs got smashed:

  • Added sane de­­faults for most op­­tion­s, so you can have a lean con­­fig file.

  • Made lay­out of the site theme re­spon­­sive, with col­lap­s­ing navbar.

  • Use time­­line in­­stead of pars­ing post_­­pages in gen­er­ic_­­page_ren­der­er and task_ren­der_­­pages.

  • Up­­­dat­ed dis­­qus in­­te­­gra­­tion code, added iden­ti­­fiers so it works on any URL.

  • Make sure fold­er links end in "/" in the gallery code.

  • Re­­moved copy of PyRSS2­­Gen, made it a de­pen­­den­­cy.

  • De­­tect "names­­pace" de­pen­­den­­cies for Mako tem­­plates.

  • Use con­­sis­­tent en­­cod­ings in RSS feed­s.

  • Refac­­tored dis­­qus code in­­­to sep­a­rate helpers

  • Use the cor­rect ex­ten­­sion (or raise an er­ror) on new_­­post

  • Fix ti­­tles that in­­­clude quotes

  • Up­­­dat­ed to cur­rent CSS from do­cu­tils (was us­ing ver­­sion from 2005)

  • Avoid need­­less re­­gen­er­a­­tion of gallery in­­dex­es.

  • Al­ways en­­sure the fold­er for the new post ex­ist­s.

  • Get ti­­tle from file­­name if not avail­able in meta­­da­­ta.

  • Don't copy sources if they end in ".ht­m­l"

  • Don't link to un­ex­ist­ing tran­s­la­­tion­s.

  • Sort tags case in­­sen­si­­tive.

En­joy!

The Drought

Cover for The Drought

Review:

Clear­ly in­spired by Stephen King, spe­cial­ly "It", in­clud­ing an echo of that part ev­ery­one hates/loves.

In fac­t, if Stephen King was dead, I would sus­pect this was writ­ten dur­ing a séance. Not bad though!

Siempre que pasa un tren.

Es­cuchan­do "Mi Gin Ton­ic" de Cala­maro con mi seño­ra, es­cuchamos "Hay un de­seo que pi­do siem­pre que pasa un tren". Me río, di­go "Ese ver­so es una pancheza­", y el­la me aclara que cuan­do es­tás en un puente y pasa el tren, hay que pedir un de­seo.

Jamás había oí­do hablar de esa su­per­sti­ción, y en­tonces caigo: es porque en San­ta Fe nun­ca pasa el tren. Es­to me abre la puer­ta a in­ven­tar su­per­sti­ciones hiper­locales, co­mo "cuan­do te mea una catan­ga in­di­ca fu­turo in­for­tu­nio en el amor", o "el pa­so del ca­malote predice el cli­ma". O, co­mo decía mi vie­ja, "si cruzan los sirirís, viene tor­men­ta".

Los de­jo con Cala­maro:

Lunch-hour feature in Nikola: Blogger import

To­day at lunch, I added sup­port for im­port­ing blog­ger (maybe al­so blogspot? They seem to be the same nowa­days) blogs in­to Niko­la my stat­ic blog/site en­gine.

What works?

Well, the on­ly site I tried work­s, most­ly.

  • Posts

  • Pages

  • Tags

  • Drafts

  • Blog Meta­­da­­ta (ex­­cept lan­guage)

  • Redi­rects to keep URLs sta­ble (at least it tries re­al­­ly hard!)

  • URL rewrit­ing in the posts (it tries!)

What's not there?
  • Com­­ments im­­port (it makes more sense to im­­port them via Dis­­qus' im­­port tool)

  • At­­tach­­ments (im­ages and such)

  • Much test­ing

It's ba­si­cal­ly on par with the Word­press im­port, ex­cept noone has used it for re­al. So, feel free to try!

(It's niko­la im­port_blog­ger name_of_the_­dump.xm­l)


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