Tuesday, 26th July, 2005

A Weblog Anatomy

tranniefesto weblog code

Despite wanting to go off on one about the way transvestites seem to push each other further and further out of the closet, prompted by what Katya said in The Angels this morning (which I might have a go at later, when my head is clearer), I though I might take a little bit of time to answer rather thoroughly one of the questions that pops up in my .INBOX on a regular basis:

What blogging software do you use?

My usual, if rather curt, reply is something along the lines of "None, I wrote it myself", but that's probably quite unhelpful and I thought that perhaps, if I expanded on it a little, it might be of interest to someone. (I'm not holding my breath though)

Hardware

OK, so we all know I'm a bit of an Apple Fangirl and that my server is called "Erin". Erin is connected to the internet through first an AirPort Base Station (called "Tara"), and then a little ADSL modem to my once-awesome-but-now-rather-feeble 512K/256K ADSL line.

She's running Mac OSX Server 10.2.9, and all I've really done to her is update PHP to version 5.

Files

When I first started all of this, I kept every day in a MySQL database, but I found it so difficult to edit things, and to cope with escaping certain characters, that two months ago (just after my hard-disk died) I decided to move over to a folder/file based way of storing stuff.

Basically, the folders look like this:

src
|
|--2005
|    |
|    |-01
|    |-02
|    |-03
|    |-04
|    |-05
|    |-06
|    |-07
|
|--2004
|    |
|    |-01
|    |-02

[etc]

...and then inside the folders is a file for each day. I find this a much simpler way of doing things than I did before, not least of which being that I can use a multitude of UNIX commands to do stuff with the files — editing and writing with vi rather than having to use a web interface.

All that happens then, when you visit the site, is that Erin pulls out whichever file she needs, then runs it through a series of regular expressions, and spits it out inside some bog-standard HTML.

Simple

Comments

Most of the regular expression malarky just deals with things like emoticons (), automatic links ( Miss K) and one or two cunning bits of typography (The Guardian), but the bit I'm most proud of, is the comment stuff.

Comments were something that I tacked onto the script a long time after I wrote it, and it took me a while to get them right. Initially, I'd stored them in a separate database, with the intention of displaying them after the main body of rantage. But to be honest, I didn't like it (and I still don't). I know that everyone else has comments after what they write, but it doesn't work for me. I like to think of this thing as a conversation, and it annoys me when I have to click on a link to see what other people are saying.

I dunno, forgive me if I sound a bit rude here, but having comments separately always makes a blog seem a little preachy to me

So, the way mine work is that the web-script just shoves them straight into the appropriate file. In a block of text. Like this:

</p><!-- -----BEGIN COMMENT v2.0----- -->
Alli' Cat'|||Back to annoying advertisements. There's one for Dove
deodorant   running in the states at the moment.  It must have
been written by the most moronic copy-writer ever to slide about
the earth on a trail of mucus.  The tag-line goes, "Dove. Puts
back what shaving takes away."  <STRONG>Well that would be
<U>hair</U> then, wouldn't it?</STRONG> :wacko:|11223798129878
<!-- ------END COMMENT v2.0------ -->

...and then the script does a bit of jiggery-pokery, splits it up into the sections delineated with "|" and wraps it in some <div>s. All the cunning re-using-profiles-from-Flickr-and-Blogger stuff happens beforehand — when you actually post the comment.

The funny-looking number at the end is stuck in by Erin to make sure double-posting of comments doesn't happen. Basically, it's a UNIX timestamp followed by a random number, and whenever a comment gets posted, she checks to see if the number exists.

So far it's worked

The other note-worthy thing about comments, is the comment form itself. I was rather chuffed with how I managed to get the re-use-various-profiles thing to work — basically, all that happens is that when you post a comment, Erin tries to scrape your details from the relevant profile page (Blogger, Flickr, the Angels) and then uses that data to display names, pictures and other stuff.

Flickr Photographs

Despite my general smugness about the main weblog script, the real fun happens in a series of scripts that get called by various cron jobs.

Every quarter of an hour, Erin reads an RSS feed for a separate blog that I've set up and linked to my Flickr Photostream, and compares the list of photographs with an md5-hashed cache of them that's in a folder (somewhere). If there's a new one, she squirts it into the day's entry (or makes a new one if there isn't one for a day)

I would have liked to have written something more elegant for that, but I don't have a Flickr API key (despite asking for one )

del.icio.us

A similar thing happens with my del.icio.us bookmarks, except that instead of it being a cron job, it happens each time the main page is viewed (but I have a locally cached copy so that I don't get in trouble)

Favicons

del.icio.us also drives my little blogroll thingy — but in addition to just displaying the links, every once in a while, Erin goes and pulls the favicons from each of the blogs (if they have one) and converts them to a png

Pings and RSS

I used to have a cron job that would check to see if a page had been updated, then would rewrite the RSS feed and ping weblogs.com and technorati.com — but I was finding that despite a cunning bit of manipulation of the file-modification-times whenever a comment was posted, she was updating them every time there was a new comment. Which I gather was a pain for everyone who subscribed to http://www.tranniefesto.co.uk/tranniefesto.xml

So now I do it manually. Once I've written something, I run the script by hand.

Speaking of Editing...

This is the side of things that I'm least happy with. I think it took some people by surprise when I first mentioned that I write this stuff at the command-line, but in general, I do.

I'd love a piece of software like MarsEdit, or something similar, but the way I do things at the moment, is, well...

First of all, I usually write a big chunk of rantage in BBEdit. Thanks to the delightful John Gruber's excellent Markdown, I don't have to worry about mark-up, I just write as if it was an email.

Then I throw the file into a special secret folder, and use a special secret URL to preview what I've written, which uses the same spell-checking functions that I built into the comment-preview script (basically, I throw the text at ispell)

When I'm happy with it, I save it in the relevant folder, and give it the day of the month as a filename (eg. I'll save this as '26' in a few miunutes). All done

But the biggest problem I have (and one that I had before I dropped the MySQL as it happens) is what to do if someone leaves a comment while I'm working on the main file?

I've toyed with the idea of writing something that will store comments in a temporary file and append them after I've finished working on a day, but the current system I'm using uses two Terminal.app windows:

1. tail -fn200 /path/to/today
2. cat >> /path/to/today

That way, I can write away to my heart's content, knowing that whatever I write will get appended to today, without writing over any comments. It also has the rather nice aesthetic appearance of a real-time chatroom...

...

So yeah, that's how this thing works. Now, if you'll excuse me for a couple of hours, my favourite two shows are about to start (car-fixing and woodworking), and then afterwards I might have a bit of a rant about trannies forcing other trannies out of the closet...

Non Conformity

(Should that be one word? )

I was woken this morning, at about 7am by what I can only assume was an exasserbated sign from across the globe.

Here's the plot so far:

After a bit of a lull in the UK Angels Mailing List, there was a slight flurry of "Hi! I'm a new girl"-type-posts.

These "Hi! I'm a new girl"-type-posts were quickly followed by a succession of "Hi new girl!"-type-posts, most of which contained some form of encouragement to "go out".

Last night, Katya donned her thinking-cap (which I believe has feathers in it), and as well as posting a particularly interesting comment here, sent an email to the mailing list pondering on the 'girls' who don't ever go out, and wanting to hear their stories.

I suppose what I'm trying to say is that heading out and doing 'public' isn't for everyone and maybe shouldn't be held up as the be all and end all, as it sometimes appears to be.

Katya's beautifully put point was then completely missed, and from the way I'm reading things, a little bit of "I go out more than you" competition is brewing...

...

This is something that's bugged me for ages, and it's something I've ranted about before. I find it strangely unsettling that there seems to be a proscribed routine for trannies that want to 'make it' in the world.

The routine is usually something like this:

1. Buy wig
2. Buy decent boobies
3. Buy clothes
4. Go to dressing service
5. Go to some kind of organised event
6. Feel elated by going to event. Go to more
7. Build some for of website to show photos of yourself at said events
8. Come out to all and sundry

The thing is though, and I know it's never actually said, but I always get the feeling sometimes that there's a general consensus that if you don't do these things, then you are not A Proper Transvestite™.

It's like somehow, the definition of transvestite somehow includes a hidden, invisible section which reads "someone who does a lot of shopping and goes to a lot of clubs".

Now, whilst I admit that I do love going out clubbing as Siobhan, why should I? What if I didn't like clubbing? What if I was a shy and retiring type who didn't much like going out in public, let alone dressed as a girl.

I don't understand where this idea comes from really. I can appreciate that there is often a deep desire to be seen when dressed — after all, we go to so much bloody effort that it seems like such a waste to just take a few pictures then get the facial-wipes out. But why is it held up like some kind of Trannie-Holy-Grail?

I dunno. I just feel sometimes that the pressure that we all put on ourselves to conform is a bit too much. True, going out is great fun — but only if you like going out anyway.

Sometimes, people just don't want to do things. Sometimes people want to do things but they can't. Sometimes people want to do things, get the chance, then completely bugger it up.

I think it's wrong for us to set down the Rules of Transvestism™ — no matter if we mean to or not. It's not bloody easy coming to terms with being like us, and being made to feel somehow inadequate just because we don't particularly want to be 'out' doesn't help at all.

It's also bloody patronising.

I somehow fear that a diagram like that would be almost total overlap

Loss Of Picture

A constant source of frustration for me, is the fact that when Erin's hard disk died at the start of June, even though I managed to rescue all the text from the past four years, I lost all the pictures

Not good eh?

Which is why, if you go back and look through stuff up to as recent as March 2005 (and more recent incidently), there are great big gaps where pictures should be.

I haven't actually lost the photographs — I keep everything I ever take in several locations, but it'll take me ages to work out which photo goes where.

But I will do it some day — I don't like those gaps.

Anyway, the reason I'm mentioning this, is because tomorrow, Kath and I are going up to Scotland for a few days, and I was going to link to the last time we went up there. Except there are no photos of the Exciting Exhaust Bodge™

So, apologies. If I get the chance this evening (after I've had a picnic with Kath and her mother and her sister), I'll see if I can restore them...

Picnic at the Ashton

(via flickr.com/people/si08han)

it would be nice if we could still sneak a comment in at the bottom of the relevant section...

Aye, this has always been a Thing™

The thing is though, as Becky says, it would "disjoint the conversation", disrupt the flow I guess it all comes down to how you perceive this thing. Personally, I see it as a conversastion in a pub (and not just because I'm very often pissed when I write it) — the sort of conversation that you don't think twice about going back to something I said earlier.

could I suggest that you change the wording on the Angels part to be "Your UK angels #ID"?

Good plan Gemma. Will do.

my Gravatar now "breaks out" in a semi-groovy way from the little box next to the "add comments" form.

Yeah — I must get round to fixing that code How does the PNG look on MSIE?

maybe some of the "girls" are just enthusiastic about how much they enjoy going out themselves, and then wholeheartedly recommend others do the same — just a thought.

...and a perfectly valid thought Rachel, I agree. But sometimes, I feel that the tone of the "recommendations" turns to nagging...

Brocolli

I hated brocolli as a kid. My mother used to shove the grey mush (yeah, I know) in front of me every Sunday lunchtime with the words "go on — you can't know if you like it or not until you try it"

Years later, I discovered that rather than stew brocolli in a pressure-cooker for an hour, if you quickly boiled it for a couple of minutes, it was actually incredibly yummy.

It took me to find out for myself how nice brocolli was — and to cook it in a way that I'd discovered without my mother's help.

OK, so maybe this is a bad analogy, as I could obviously tell that grey vegetables can't be very nice. But the point was that it got to the point where I was only not eating it, because of the nagging.

What I think is important though, is that practically everyone's experience of being TV, TG, whatever is different. And we all have to find out for ourselves how we want to express it, and in what way expressing it makes us feel comfortable. I don't think that anyone insisting that everyone has to "get out there" is being intentionally nasty — but I do feel that sometimes people's good intentions tend not to take into account how others might actually be feeling.

If that makes any sense?

So, next time I see a negative comment, I'll respond to the previous poster and be encouraging and helpful and draw out more what they think.

Gemma, that's a really cool thing. Internet/email arguments tend to turn into one-side-trying-to-shout-down-the-other, rather than an actual reasoned debate. I really like that idea

really want to comment on something higher up the page, but feel that the moment has passed.

The moment never passes Joanna I never stop thinking about all this shit

I get what you're saying about comments all at the end being somewhat "preachy"

I guess, Becky, it's a little like "Here me while I say this ... now you may all comment" know what I mean. No, thinking out loud I can't think of a way either. NRT once suggested that instead of doing loads of things on one page, I should spilt the days up into separate topics.

But My head doesn't work like that — it always flows back into itself.

Least Wanted

Sorry, changing the subject

Prompted by noticing a Google referrer of "trannies in girly clothes", I wondered what was high on Google for "trannies", and came across this collection of old mugshots on Flickr

Part of me is wanting to leave a comment for the wise-crackers, for example Mr Norman Hathaway, don't criticise people's hair when you're wearing ludicrous sunglasses, but the rest of me just wants to go through each and every photograph and ponder them.

Who were these people? What had they done? What's going through their minds? What happened to them next?

Here are the rest of his(?) sets They're strangely beautiful

...

One thing I haven't managed to find is how to set up a favicon. Any hints or tips gratefully received.

Hmm, correct me if I'm wrong Selina, but as well as having a blogger.com weblog, you embed it into your website. Which means that it should be possible to attach a favicon to it...

All you need is this is the <head> part of your main frameset:

<LINK REL="SHORTCUT ICON" HREF="/favicon.ico">

...and, obviously, a 16 x 16 pixel Windows icon file at the top level of your website, called "favicon.ico" (although, actually, almost any type of image-file will do)

Give me a shout when I get back from Scotland, and I'll help

...

Wait, scrap that — it is possible to change the favicon — the favicon doesn't have to live in the normal place. This just worked for me (on Safari, so I don't know how other browsers will handle it)

I stuck âˆ<LINK REL="SHORTCUT ICON" HREF="http://www.tranniefesto.co.uk/favicon.ico"> into my blogger.com template, and the result is this

Yeah, but the favicon Jane — is that OK? (Ignore all the sidebar stuff — that was just me trying to help Joanna out the other day)

So yet again MSIE doesn't play ball. Ack well, I suppose since they invented the things, you've got to cut them some slack...

Big Red Button

This annoys me. Not least because every little slash-troll after having spent years dissing Apple now suddenly wants a piece of the action, but because there's a strange belief within the RumourMill that Steve Jobs has his finger constantly poised over a big red button (in a George Bush Kinda Way) marked "Port Mac OSX to PC"

I can see it now — there, next to his Zen balls and his Lisa, it's flashing right now. "Port to PC Steve ... port Mac OSX to PC"

Bollocks

Call me a FanGirl if you like, but I'll happily believe that Steve has Very Good Reasons™ for not wiping the board using The Greatest Operating System In The World, Ever. If Apple was about software, then maybe — but it's not.

And more's the point, it's not dead either. If I had a Pound for every "Apple made a boo boo" article or weblog post that's appeared since 1979,I'd have at least £500 by now.

But they're still here. And they're still better than Windows. And no amount of Slashdot whining is ever going to change that.

(Linux sucks by the way. Not just "sucks", "sucks". With itallics and everything — an entire operating system based around the "me too!" concept? Yeah right...)

...

The favion looked fine in firefox Siobhan.

Cheers honey

For The Benefit of Kris

Crap — has that broken? Bugger. I'll have to fix it.

Yeah, sorry about that — I had a little bit too much to drink last night and got a bit ranty

Actually, I've been using Apple machines since before System 1 — The very first program I wrote was on an Apple II back in about 1980/1/2/3 (can't remember exactly when). It went something like this...

> 10 PRINT "HELLO"
> 20 GOTO 10

I kid you not