Blogging in Drummer #30
Comments
|
I am following the instructions and they are working easily. Results at http://oldschool.scripting.com/mistersugar/ I am trying the PagePark instruction now, thinking that the code needs spaces before/after the curly brackets. Will wait a few minutes to see if the new Drummer blog shows at http://test.stor.im. May have to update PagePark. More testing and notes to come ... |
|
Thanks for checking this out! ;-) Whitespace is not significant in JSON, as far as I know. This is literally the text of the config.json for clueless.lucky.wtf.
|
|
These are comments and questions from my first read-through of "Blogging in Drummer". Probably the major value of them is as unrefined first impressions. Overall impression, the writing is fine but is implicitly making a lot of assumptions about what the reader knows/understands about Dave's blogging style and software stack. For a broader audience those assumptions won't apply and more explanation will be needed. You introduce that "Old School is a blogging CMS" and explain how it fits together with Drummer and PagePark. The CMS most people are likely to be familiar with is Wordpress which is pretty heavy weight end-to-end solution: an Editor, a content storage "data base", a deployment engine (ie, site generator), dynamic page generation on the web server, etc. When used together with Drummer and PagePark, Old School seems like is just a piece of the overall CMS system you have built. Am I correct in my impression that Old School is essentially a "static site generator"? If so, I think it would be clear if you had said "Old School is a static site generator for bloggers" and built upon that summary description. My conceptional model is: Drummer CMS System:
The other preconception that readers are likely to have concerns "what is as blog"? We know what Dave means by "blog" but the hypothetical broader audience probably doesn't. They are probably thinking about magazine-style "blogs" with relatively long and infrequently added articles. You might want to clarify that. Also, is Drummer+Old School a good solution for article length posts? It seems to me that when you write those you usually publish them as a distinct page that you link to from your blog. Would you write the article in Drummer as a separate outline and then link to it from a post within blog.opml? Is the name blog.opml special? If I have multiple blogs can I have multiple blog opml files in a single Drummer instance? It appears to me that PagePark is completely optional—it's just a web server and I could deploy to any server I might be using. So, presumably what Old School actually emits is just a set of files arranged in a directory hierarchy and when using an alternative server I would need to provide my own deployment steps. That's just my first round thoughts. Don't feel obliged to answer everything that has a "?" above. They aren't really questions but more a reflection of my process of digesting what you wrote. |
|
I'm Old School myself, having started blogging under Dave's tutelage in 1999. I've also been using Dave's online outlining systems for the duration, which in my case goes back to MORE in the late '80s.
I am also adept at Wordpress, and operate five blogs that run on it. I also consider it a lousy blogging platform, because it favors highly composed essay-length posts. That's what I write on those blogs (and on Medium sometimes too), but I don't consider it blogging.
I do consider what Dave's does blogging. It's what I feel at home doing here. Dig: http://oldschool.scripting.com/dsearls/ .
I think blogging lost its way when Ev & Co. sold Blogger to Google, and when Movable Type closed their source code and Wordpress—an open source knock-off—took over. It also didn't help that Twitter and Facebook became easier places to blurt out text and publish pictures and get all social.
But that's just history. I want to share that much because I hope what Dave's doing here will appeal to old school bloggers who wandered off or whose voices got ignored or drowned out in the social media era. That's not a trivial cohort. I'd like to help bring them back, and to appeal to a new cohort as well.
Doc
… On Aug 12, 2021, at 7:05 PM, Allen Wirfs-Brock ***@***.***> wrote:
These are comments and questions from my first read-through of "Blogging in Drummer". Probably the major value of them is as unrefined first impressions.
Overall impression, the writing is fine but is implicitly making a lot of assumptions about what the reader knows/understands about Dave's blogging style and software stack. For a broader audience those assumptions won't apply and more explanation will be needed.
You introduce that "Old School is a blogging CMS" and explain how it fits together with Drummer and PagePark. The CMS most people are likely to be familiar with is Wordpress which is pretty heavy weight end-to-end solution: an Editor, a content storage "data base", a deployment engine (ie, site generator), dynamic page generation on the web server, etc. When used together with Drummer and PagePark, Old School seems like is just a piece of the overall CMS system you have built.
Am I correct in my impression that Old School is essentially a "static site generator"? If so, I think it would be clear if you had said "Old School is a static site generator for bloggers" and built upon that summary description. My conceptional model is:
Drummer CMS System:
Drummer: outline-based authoring editor and editorial content storage.
Old School: outline-driven static site generator
PagePark: (optional) web server for statically generated sites
The other preconception that readers are likely to have concerns "what is as blog"? We know what Dave means by "blog" but the hypothetical broader audience probably doesn't. They are probably thinking about magazine-style "blogs" with relatively long and infrequently added articles. You might want to clarify that. Also, is Drummer+Old School a good solution for article length posts? It seems to me that when you write those you usually publish them as a distinct page that you link to from your blog. Would you write the article in Drummer as a separate outline and then link to it from a post within blog.opml?
Is the name blog.opml special? If I have multiple blogs can I have multiple blog opml files in a single Drummer instance?
It appears to me that PagePark is completely optional—it's just a web server and I could deploy to any server I might be using. So, presumably what Old School actually emits is just a set of files arranged in a directory hierarchy and when using an alternative server I would need to provide my own deployment steps.
That's just my first round thoughts. Don't feel obliged to answer everything that has a "?" above. They aren't really questions but more a reflection of my process of digesting what you wrote.
—
You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread.
Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#30 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AALK7I6TPL7CIZGXY22WDDDT4RHTVANCNFSM5CBVELSA>.
Triage notifications on the go with GitHub Mobile for iOS <https://apps.apple.com/app/apple-store/id1477376905?ct=notification-email&mt=8&pt=524675> or Android <https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.github.android&utm_campaign=notification-email>.
|
|
I have a singular post that has attributes of created (with the date) and type (outline). It shows the page icon next to the node. I had used the + button to create this post. I have another singular post that has only the attribute of created (with the date). It has the carat icon next to the node. I had hit return from that other singular post to get this node. Both singular posts are displayed in the same way on the blog. I understand that the advantage of using the + to create a new post is that it correctly creates the nodes for the month and the day. (I tried to create a post for July 20 but that didn't seem to work; I'll have to try this again and document my effort to correctly report here.) After that, is there any disadvantage to creating a new post by simply hitting return? That is, is there a reason or advantage for the attribute of outline for a singular post? I've noticed this in LittleOutliner before but never documented my question. I should have. But Drummer gave me a new perspective. :) |
|
Dave, blogging with Drummer is a joy. Very smooth. I've selected "Build my blog" seemingly a thousand times as I've adjusted and corrected and tested. Is that a problem or is there a limit? Also, I like that the build tool is the bottom of the Tools options, which made it easy for me to keep selecting it. But I accidentally selected 'Outline file hierarchy' once and didn't see that Drummer had inserted nodes into my blog outline. Easily corrected. I did briefly find myself wishing Drummer had the formatting tools (link, bold, italics) that you built into 1999. |
|
Good morning! Nice to see the comments here... First to @allenwb's questions/comments.
To @dsearls...
To @mistersugar...
BTW, in defense of @allenwb -- he's been an incredibly helpful member of this test group because he's one of the leading experts in the world on the JavaScript language. We're doing some daring things with the language in Drummer, and having him as an adviser and friend has made a huge difference. @dsearls is an expert in blogging and marketing, and other related stuff. I have a lot of experience writing docs, and I don't have any problems calling Old School a blogging CMS. I basically invented the idea of a blogging CMS, and blogs for that matter, so if anyone objects they can |
|
@mistersugar -- as promised, a recipe for adding an icon that builds your blog. http://docserver.scripting.com/drummer/blogging.opml#1628861390000 |
|
Let's look at some of the first attempts, and look for obvious problems, fixes that are needed.
Example of a titled posthttp://oldschool.scripting.com/cluelessnewbie/2021/08/13/150253.html?title=aPostOnItsOwnPage |
|
Confirming that the RSS feed works. I grabbed it from the bottom of the page and included it in the River of News I monitor at river.zuiker.com and my Drummer posts show up (albeit way down the river after some podcast feed I must also have added recently). |
|
I posted additional items today, including a titled post followed by a singular post. In the blog, there's not much of a divide between the two (other than the Twitter RT icon), which makes the singular post feel as if it is part of the titled post. I know that I can reorder the posts, but maybe I want the titled post to be higher. Should this be a style choice for a user to define, or should it be different by default? |
|
@mistersugar -- I might have some ideas how to do it, to make it so a titled post stands off from a singular post that comes after it. Maybe put a light box around the titled post? In the meantime, I recommend putting the singular posts first, followed by the titled post. I've been doing it that way forever. ;-) |
|
I just wrote a fun post. http://scripting.com/2021/08/13/194244.html?title=wereCooked |
|
Dave, I have not been able to get the cloud-upload icon to show up in the iconbar. I have attempted this in both Safari and Firefox, and have cleared the cache and reloaded and signed out of Twitter and back in. Still no icon in the iconbar. I even checked the console for errors but don't see anything related. I suspect I have not entered the code correctly, so a screenshot of my Iconbar file here. UPDATE: Talked to Dave, expanded the browser window to full extent of my laptop window, and there the icon was. |
|
got my Old School blog started, and linked to Ken Smith's blog - fun! |
|
Thank you for the urlHeaderImage options, Dave. I added that to the OPML headers, and also made a change to the description for my blog. No amount of building the blog or refreshing the page would show the changes, but once I added a new post and built the blog, the header image and description refreshed. Perhaps as expected, but documenting my usage anyway. |
|
I documented that behavior. It's in the blogging docs. |
|
About the question in the thread above of readers easily telling apart the titled posts and the untitled posts...one day in now, and I'm finding the different placement of the RT icon a very natural signal, and the concern has dropped away for me. |
|
urltweet Smooth sailing again this morning with a few brief Drummer posts. The include-a-tweet function is a real pleasure. http://oldschool.scripting.com/KenSmith/2021/08/14.html#a120830 |
|
I like the way you're using it. http://oldschool.scripting.com/KenSmith/ I think we have to do a lot better with titled posts that come before singular posts. Also, I see you're doing whole-headline links, I never do that, so I'm unaccustomed to how they are presented. Not sure I like it. (This is self-criticism btw.) |
|
@akaKenSmith Nice Drummer. I'm unclear how you get the URLs in smaller size to display at the end of a post. Is that a function of Twitter, formatting in Drummer, an attribute, or some other practice that I've missed in the docs? |
|
@mistersugar -- this is how @akaKenSmith did it...
|
|
inlineImage My first attempt at posting an inlineImage worked smoothly. I like the way the text displays with and under the image when the text has been posted in the same line of the outline as the inlineImage command. I'll try other arrangements too. |
|
I followed the instructions for creating and using a glossary but am not seeing the expected rendering in my blog. My glossary.opml is public at http://drummer.scripting.com/mistersugar/glossary.opml My blog.opml is at http://drummer.scripting.com/mistersugar/glossary.opml and shows the urlGlossary attribute in the headers. My test post is at http://oldschool.scripting.com/mistersugar/2021/08/21.html#a185626 -- in Drummer I typed "ZChronicles" and expected to see Zuiker Chronicles in the rendered blog. Please help me know if I've overlooked something or if this is a bug. For the instructions, it might help to better explain the role of quotations in the glossary file, though the examples provided are easy to emulate (unless this is where I messed up). |
|
@mistersugar -- I don't see anything obviously wrong, i'll check it out. re your suggestion for the docs, quotation marks aren't special. any characters that appear at the top level will be substituted if they appear. i use them in my own glossary, as you can see but you could just as easily use a $ in their place, or nothing at all. |
|
@mistersugar -- there was a bug, I fixed it, and was able to get my test blog to build using your glossary. http://oldschool.scripting.com/cluelessnewbie/2021/08/21.html Please try your experiment again, and let me know if it worked. |
|
@akaKenSmith -- good one. I fixed it in the change node for the 23rd. thanks. |
|
Fixed a bug in Old School, the software that renders Drummer blogs. I noticed that there were only five days worth of posts on the cluelessnewbie blog. But there were many more days worth of blog posts on the site, dating back to mid-August. Turns out that Old School was counting days on the home page incorrectly. There's a max of 25 days, it was counting every day as it worked its way back, whether or not I had posted anything that day. So with 25 as the max, it ran out of days on Sept 4. And thus it didn't look at anything earlier than that. I had to rewrite the loop so it only counted days that there were actual posts on, and now it works. You might have been affected by this if:
This bug has been in there a long time, but I never saw it with Scripting News because basically I blog every day even if I don't have anything to say. 😀 Confirms that it's even worse than it appears. |
|
Hi! I'm trying out Drummer. I'd like to host my blog at my own domain, but I'm not sure of the best way to do it. I would use PagePark if I had a public-facing Linux box and control of port 80, but I don't. What I do have is a shared web server at pair.com. So the alternative I can think of is to add something to the cloud-upload script that fetches the files generated by drummerCms and FTPs them to my shared web server. I can see from the DW menu scripts how to fetch files, but I don't know the scripting language so I don't know how to send them by FTP. Questions:
|
|
@dcoletta -- thanks for the question, glad you're trying out Drummer. Drummer only supports HTTP at this time, no FTP support. Even if you did have FTP verbs, not sure running a script in Drummer is the way to go. The pages are being built in another app, not Drummer. We sort of job it out. ;-) I don't know the answer. Public-facing Linux servers are pretty cheap these days. $5 a month buys you a lot. You can also run an app for free on Glitch. It takes a few seconds to startup but for $0 it's pretty good. We've been able to run PagePark there. I'd be most comfortable with you using PP if possible, because then we could help you fix problems if there aren't enough config.json options. I'll think more about it though, I expect this will be a FAQ. And welcome aboard. :-) PS: You picked a good place to post this question, how did you find it? |
|
Thanks for the quick reply! I don't mind spending $5/month for a public-facing web server where I can control port 80. I'll also take a look at Glitch. I agree, better if I can run it on PagePark. Thanks for the welcome, too. P.S. I found this place by reading all the way to the end of http://docserver.scripting.com/drummer/blogging.opml (linked to from your recent blog post) and then posting where you told me to! :) |
|
@dcoletta -- excellent. If you don't mind the $5/month, then let's go that route. I just reviewed the docs for setting up PagePark for this use, and I think it's pretty straightforward. But I'm happy to help if you need it. |
|
I spent a few minutes trying Glitch and ran into what looks like the dateFormat.js problem that you blogged about recently.
I'm a little nervous that if I hit it via Glitch, I'll hit it anywhere else too. I left a comment about it here. Also if you have a suggestion for a $5/month host where I can run a web server on port 80, that'd be great too. |
|
I saw your other comment. I use Digital Ocean. Great docs, i like their user interface, really reliable. We'll get past this, I checked PagePark was last updated two months ago, I think the dateformat thing happened since then, i checked pp doesn't directly use dateformat. that doesn't mean something it uses does. I can't try to work on this now, it's been a long day, but I'll set up a fresh PP install tomorrow morning and if there are problems, I'll see what i can do to fix them. |
|
Thanks, long day for me too. (My "day job" is CTO of a pot shop, so I spent my Sunday writing data visualizations on our customer database.) |
|
Okay then we'll be really good friends. ;-) |
|
I want to chime in this discussion on PP as well. I started my blog yesterday on Drummer. I want to host it on my own domain I have hooked up to PagePark on Glitch. Since I installed PP a few months back. It says version 0.8.20 in the package.json. From what I understand I need to update the PP package on Glitch? I did this with |
|
Small update: For some reason after the update I constantly get errors in Glitch with the "App Status". So I started a new Glitch project with the most recent PagePark git repo. Moved the custom domain from the old to the new Glitch project. I don't get any errors. in the App Status. But in the logs it says: I've seen this mentioned in #57 as well. Any thoughts on what might be the case here? |
|
Dave, thanks for making Drummer (and all its infrastructure) available to all! I've been following you and at least playing with your software since the 90s. (And we even met once at Grand Central Station a long time ago...) Anyway: are there any issues with using Drummer under Safari? On macOS Big Sur 11.6, with Safari 15.1, the "Tools" > "Build my blog…" command doesn't seem to redirect to http://oldschool.scripting.com/defjaf as it should (but it does actually build the page, as far as I can tell). It all works from Chrome. On a related point, is the |
|
@defjaf You might try allowing popup windows (Preferences->Websites) for drummer.scripting.com and oldschool.scripting.com. I seem to remember seeing warnings in Safari when choosing "Build my blog" the first few times, so I allow popups and, although Safari doesn't actually open a new window, it does open the site in a new tab. Worth a try, maybe. |
|
I want to change the page top image. I know I have seen a howto on that, but I just spent 15 mins trying to find it again and couldn't. Please, someone, have mercy and remind me? :) |
|
I would like to create a second blog published at a different place. I know how to do it under a different Twitter account, and that may well be the right thing. But suppose I wanted to have two blogs under the same Twitter account. I started trying an experiment but it seemed like it was going to crash into my first blog and I couldn't see what to do about that. Is having two blogs under the same Twitter account supported? Edit: I can't see how it could work if the build command only takes the Twitter account name as a parameter. |
|
@dcoletta, I was able to set an urlHeaderImage attribute via File > Edit OPML headers and adding an URL for an appropriately sized image that I control elsewhere on the web. It's been a while, so I don't recall whether the blog has to have something new added, then rebuilt, before the image appears, or not. |
|
@dcoletta for header image see http://docserver.scripting.com/drummer/blogging.opml#1628776837000 EDIT: shoot, that's not the right place. Let me look, but do follow Ken's tip. The post above references instructions but I can't determine where they were at the time. So maybe this is missing from the Blogging in Drummer doc. |
I can confirm that this works. I used the "Build my blog" function to make the change live. I couldn't find it mentioned in the Drummer docs, but followed @akaKenSmith instructions. |
|
Thanks! I got it to work. |
|
Reporting a small good thing: HTML has not always been friendly for displaying poetry, often putting too much vertical space between each line of poetry. But I was able to insert a few lines of poetry into a blog post today, and I think it displays nicely in two different browsers. I wrapped some HTML code around five lines of poetry and entered it into a single node of the outline. This is how that node looks in the outline:
Here you can view it in the middle of the blog post itself: http://oldschool.scripting.com/KenSmith/2021/10/29/144015.html?title=revisionoriented Note: the first This could still backfire in some displays, I know. But I was pleased enough that I went ahead and put a two-line poem in under my copyright notice at the bottom of the blog's main page. http://oldschool.scripting.com/KenSmith/ Not sure if this was the right place to post this. |
|
Using Little Outliner I have lost files opened in a tab, being rewritten with the content on another open file. With LO2 it was a matter of recovering a previous version from Dropbox. But with Drummer that's not the case, the files are on the S3 bucket that Dave shares with us. Today I lost the contents of my blog.opml file, being replaced with the content of the Change Notes... This was already reported here #82 so I will move my questions and findings there. |
|
@oevl, if you have a backup of your opml files on your desktop--via the dropdown Tools menu--then the drag-and-drop recovery of one or more files works smoothly, I have found. I try to make one of those backups each day, though lately I'm not sure I've been that regular. There is a video from Dave showing the recovery method from your desktop, I'll see if I can locate the link and post it here. |
|
also @Oevi -- what's your username, your blog.opml file might still be there. worth checking. i'm thinking that drummer ought to do a backup whenever you load the app. the backups are small and quick, and would come in handy at a time like this. |
|
@akaKenSmith I should have made a backup before making any change to my blog.opml file, but I just opened Drummer, wrote a headline, clicked on the Change Notes to see what was going on, and the content of my blog.opml file was replaced by the content of Dave's Change Notes, even the OPML Header attributes. @scripting My username is @oevl (ends with a lowercase L) The file is there, but its content got replaced with the content of the file opened in the tab I clicked next, in this case it was your Change Notes. This has happened to me many times with LO2, having the content of an open file replaced by the content of another opened file, both files on adjacent tabs. |
If you have questions about Blogging in Drummer, this is a good place to ask.
The text was updated successfully, but these errors were encountered: