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Posts tagged with "website"

Switching to HUGO

HUGO Icon During the last couple of weeks I have been playing on and off with the HUGO static site generator and quickly became quite fond of it. Initially I just wanted to have yet another look at the current landscape of static site generators, but then I somehow ended up making some more extended tests with HUGO. This eventually culminated into having my complete website migrated to it.

Right at the first glance I was quite impressed by the speed of HUGO and after familiarizing myself with the basics and a little bit of tinkering I also started to like its nifty features.

After having converted my complete website to HUGO (which turned out to be much less effort than I would have anticipated), I was a wee bit hesitating about abandoning my current workflow, which has worked quite well for the last couple of years. Then again, I had switched it so often, so why not yet another time and give it a try?

And now, here we are. This post marks my switch to HUGO as the next tool for creating this website.

Changing the content creation workflow

Today, for the first time in over 10 years, I changed the way the content of this site is created. As of this post, theblackzone.net is running on static HTML pages again, which are created by a toolchain you may encounter not that often...

Read on...

Finally HTTPS

Today I found some time to tick off an item from my todo list that has been sitting there for a long time: Switching theblackzone.net to HTTPS.

Since my site is just a hobbiest website, I chose to use a free letsencrypt certificate and after reviewing the installation options, I just found out that my hosting provider offers a one-click generation and installation of letscrypt certifcates. So it was literally just a mouse click to activate HTTPS for the site.

One thing I still have to investigate is, why Firefox keeps griping about "some insecure elements" on my site. I suspect some links to content that is refered to with HTTP instead of HTTPS. But I still have to see if they are part of the content or of the code generated by Habari.

Back to static?

Habari logo Much to my dismay it looks like the Habari Project is defunct. The project's website is offline since quite a while and there wasn't a single message on the developer mailing list in months. Also, there have been no Tweets since the release of version 0.9.2. I think it's time to look for alternatives...

Read on...

2015 Website Reboot

Habari Icon After almost seven years on duty, I decided to give TheBlackzone.net a fresh start. So I took the latest version of Habari, built a new theme for it, threw out old content and updated a bunch of pages. Mostly a routine piece of work, but it was the first time I've written a Habari theme from scratch. Here’s how it went…

Read on...

Include static HTML content in your Habari posts

Habari Icon When I switched to the Habari publishing platform, I had a bunch of automatically created HTML content that I wanted to be included in my posts and pages. Mainly this content was created by some Perl scripts and automatically uploaded to my web server. Updates occurred quite often and so I had the urge to avoid time-consuming manual updates.

Read on...

Back Online

Welcome (back) everyone! Today a new version of theblackzone.net (version 3, to be precise) went online. I hope you like the new design and I also hope I didn't make to much mistakes that ruin the layout in certain browsers (yes, Internet Explorer, I'm talking about you). If you experience any difficulties or an "unattractiveness", please let me know.

As some kind of premiere the graphics for this version was solely created with Inkscape, making it the first web design I entirely created with free software and without any commercial tools. Up to now I relied on Xara Xtreme as the tool of choice when it comes to vector graphics (which by the way is still an extraordinary excellent software for this task), but unfortunately it isn't available on Linux which is my operating system since quite a while now. My standard tool set now consists of GIMP, Inkscape and Vim.

Long Time no change...

…but today I was in the mood to make a bunch of adjustments to the site. I fixed some bugs in the theme, upgraded to the latest Lightbox version and made some changes to the CSS. All in all a few hours work on a rainy afternoon. A few other changes are due during the next few days.

Habari Upgrade

First of all, Happy New Year to everyone! I haven't been maintaining my site for quite a while since I started a new job a couple of months ago which kept me occupied for most of my time.

First thing for the new year was an upgrade to the latest version of Habari which has been released in December. As always, it went nice and smoothly. One of my next actions will be a major cleanup of the site content. But only if I find the time to do it ;-)

Habari upgrade

I just upgraded this site to the latest Habari version. Yet again, it went quite smoothly and has shown no issues thus far. Nevertheless, please let me know if you experience any issues while surfing theblackzone.net.

Updating Habari, the hard way

Habari Icon For the first time in weeks I’ve found some time to take care of my blog again. The first thing I wanted to do is to upgrade to the latest version of Habari since there has been quite some development going on since my last update. After having upgraded without any problems the last couple of times, I thought that it wouldn’t be a great deal either. But this time I was entirely wrong.

While the upgrade process itself was as smooth as always the trouble began after reactivating my plugins and my theme. Two plugins and a whole bunch of theme functions have been severely broken due to the recent changes to the tag system the developers made. After having investigated the troublesome parts of the code, I was looking for solutions in Habari’s online resources and the wiki. Much to my dismay, I found that major parts of these resources are outdated and so I ended up reading a lot of the source code to find the right solution.

After a couple of hour’s work, everything seems to be fine again. But, please, if you encounter errors or non-working parts on this site, let me know.

So much for today’s Habari upgrade…

Testing Vimpress - a blogging plugin for Vim

I just came across Vimpress, a plugin for Vim that allows to create and edit blogposts directly from Vim. Looks like the right thing for me :-)

Although it is originally intended to be used with WordPress, it utilizes the MetaWeblog interface, thus it can be used with other blogs too - in my case Habari.

So, as a first test, this post is written in Vim and directly posted by the plugin. Let's see if it works...

Edit: Works quite well. There seems to be a minor bug when posting new entries (entry id is not returned correctly, respectively an error occurs when this should happen - I'll have a look at this later), but the overall functionality works. Oh, and of course this plugin is only suitable to handle text-only posts. There's no upload functionality for media files - obviously, since we are utilizing a text editor ;-)

Gallery updates

Well, nothing really new there, but in a nostalgic mood I’ve started to put up some old lan party pictures in the gallery. The complete set of 2001 is now viewable. More will follow.

Edit 2010-02-19: The whole lanparty set is now available :-)

Habari Upgrade

Today, I upgraded the site to the latest version of the Habari weblog. There are quite a bunch of improvements, yet I have to explore most of them. As last time, the upgrade process was hassle-free and I didn’t encounter any notable problems (and hopefully there aren’t any hidden ones).

Read on...

Gallery plugin enhancements

After a very busy day at work (my first workday of the month is always loaded with statistics and reporting tasks), I found some time in the evening to work a little on my newly created gallery plugin for Habari.

Read on...

The image gallery is online again

Today I made the image gallery available again. Taken for itself, of course, this isn’t a very spectacular enhancement of the site (since there’s anyways only one gallery at the moment).

The far more interesting part was the implementation of the gallery. I wanted something that seamlessly integrates into Habari. After an extensive search on the internet I found nothing that fits my needs and so I finally decided to write my own plugin.

Read on...

New Look

This took less time than expected… Enjoy the new design of theblackzone.net. If you still find some glitches, let me know.

Update to the latest Habari alpha release

Long time, no see... There've been a lot of things that kept me busy during the last couple of weeks. I'll try to catch up in the next posts. For now, I just want to note that I today upgraded to the latest Habari alpha release. While working with alpha software always tends to be risky, it runs pretty fine so far.

TheBlackzone blog is online

Okay, this is just a quick note marking the official (re-)start of my blog.

It took only a few hours (mainly template design) to adapt the Habari weblog to fit my site.

Let’s see how well (or not) it works…

Choosing a blogging solution

For 2009 I’ve planned to switch the management of my site from plain HTML to a reasonable blogging software in order to bring a little more life to this site.

Read on...