Blind Not Dumb (Posts about blog)

A Teency Bit More Housekeeping

Chris Patti — Tue, 17 May 2022 20:34:40 GMT

I'm switching the static site generator I ues for this blog from Pelican to Nikola.

There are a number of reasons for this - better/more theme options, a more active development community, and some really swank features I just love.

The up-shot however is that the RSS feeds will need to change. The new links are clearly signposted on the header at the top of the blog.

Also, I've switched the comment system from Disqus (Which I really Dis-like :) to Intense Debate which I've been using on my personal blog and love to bits.

You can find the old Disqus comments here

Thanks for understanding and updating your feed readers!

Some Brief But Important House Keeping

Chris Patti — Fri, 11 Mar 2022 06:11:00 GMT

Hi all!

Just a brief house-keeping note.

This is going to hence-forth be strictly my professional blog.

I'll be cleaning out old posts that aren't tech related and maybe moving any I feel particularly inclined to keep over to my new personal blog, Playing With Quicksilver.

I'm not trying to hide anything, so feel free to browse my old posts via the Wayback Machine over here.

I look forward to blogging here more often! I'll likely also be switching to the Nikola static site generator because it offers a number of features and creature comforts that will make my life easier (Like having a command that will pre-seed a new post with all the right metadata fields. Yay :)

As always feel free to hit me up here or on social media if you have any thoughts.

Onward!

Trying out VimRepress

cpatti — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 21:48:00 GMT

VimRePress

In an ongoing effort to immerse myself in Vim as much as possible, I'm trying out a plugin called VimRepress - a fork of the popular Vimpress plugin.

Installing

Unfortunately, getting it running with MacVim on MacOS X Lion is a bit of a bear, but thankfully Paulo Poiati wrote an excellent article on getting the job done.

Basically, if you're using Homebrew, you have to rebuild your MacVim to use the i386 architecture, otherwise you wind up with a Python interpreter that doesn't match the bitness of your editor, and when MacVim goes to invoke Python to run the blogging bits in the plugin, MacVim explodes.

Also unfortunately, you can't use the Homebrew built Python or Ruby interpreters when building MacVim either, and have to instead use the bundled ones from MacOS (both sorely out of date. Who uses Ruby 1.8 anymore? :).

So I had to uninstall my Homebrew based Python and Ruby, install python-markdown2 into the OSX default Python instance, and now everything seems to be working just fine.

Living the Vim Life

VimRepress and Blogging

That said, there are still some creature comforts that I miss from the awesome Blogging bundle in TextMate - silly things like giving me a drop down list with the possible Categories for my post and the like. Hopefully over time we can get those implemented in Vim land :)

On the upside, and this counts for a lot, is that I can now write in Markdown again <contented sigh> I've missed Markdown terribly ever since I transitioned the blog from Typo to Wordpress many moons ago. It's a joy to write in, and really lets me think about the writing, not about a properly formed HTML element, which is priceless.

Vim and Me In the Large

For what it's worth, thus far the minor pain of transitioning to Vim has been entirely worth it, I've definitely seen a noticeable productivity boost, and for work-a-day code and configuration editing, I'm actually finding Vim to be vastly more powerful than TextMate simply because my environment is everywhere I want to be rather than being chained to using my Mac desktop for editing and resorting to chicanery like remote mounted filesystems via sshfs.

For years I'd read The Pragmatic Programmer with its mantra of "Learn one editor, and learn it *well" (paraphrase).

I always had mixed feelings about that. I'd taken pride through most of my career in being able to learn a multitude of different tools and adapt to whatever worked best in the local environment. That is in fact a really great skill to have, but there is definitely wisdom where editors are concerned to pick one and live in it 24/7.

MacVim has helped tremendously with that. With it you can have your cake and eat it to. You can use the very same config files and plugins you use on your UNIX servers on your desktop, only wrapped in a superbly crafted Aqua GUI.

It's a continuing process, but thus far the work I've put in has been totally worth it. I would encourage anyone who's on the fence to give it a try and be strict with yourself about it. Pick a time when you can afford to take the hit and spend the time to get facile enough that you won't miss your old environment. You won't regret it.

Ah, Sweet Sanity!

cpatti — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 16:04:00 GMT

Woo. So, as I indicated in my old blog, I have switched to Wordpress. Typo is nifty and all, but it's still hackerware and seems unlikely to veer from that course any time soon.

Much as I love Ruby, I am still clueless about Rails and truthfully, even web development in general (I have now learned the basics of CSS - but apparently not enough to be dangerous yet, and I *still* don't know Javascript.)

WordPress does everything I need with a modicum of hassle, so that's the direction I'm moving in now.

This does mean you'll need to update your RSS links. The new link is here: https://www.feoh.org/?feed=rss2

However being Wordpress, it also supports Atom, and a bunch of others.

Anyway, look for more and more interesting bits in this space now that I can stop wrestling with the infrastructure and actually say something for a change!

Merry Christmas, Happy (belated!) Channukah, and a happy new year!