From the Orient

Here’s a new weblog by Jesse Lawrence running on Vellum.

Found via “technorati”:http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/links.html?rank=&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dellah.com%2Forient%2F&sub=Get+Link+Cosmos via a rather nifty looking “google plugin”:http://soniceast.sytes.net/~jalaw/blog/archive/4.php

Good to see some development work on Vellum, and someone other than Stuart using it “in production”

Ronaldo Ferraz has written detailed instructions on installing and running vellum on windows. It has instructions for both Apache and IIS.

I’ve been playing with Vellum a bit today. One of the features of Vellum is funky caching where if you change a blog entry, you simply delete the page. When requested, you redirect the 404 error to the build process of Vellum. Great, but I had one problem with it. Usually, I let Apache sort out directory requests so /orient/ goes to /orient/index.shtml.

However, if vellum has deleted index.html because it has been rebuilt and index.html hasn’t been expressly requested, Apache errors with “Directory index forbidden by rule:”

So, I tried “Redirect / index.html” in .htaccess, but Apache didn’t want know: “.htaccess: Redirect to non-URL”. index.html doesn’t exist, I’m not going to redirect.

Thankfully, mod_rewrite to the rescue (again).

Options FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^$ /104test/index.html
ErrorDocument 404 /vellum104/vellum.cgi?a=build

Two things that will make Vellum my personal weblogging tool of preference.

1. Python in the templates
   The ability to write Python to do whatever you want in a weblog template will make this very powerful. You won’t have to rely of a set of created tags.
2. Plugins
   You can add custom methods and attributes similiar to the way you can add new tags in MT, but you can extend the functionality using hooks. For example, I could easily add in my pingback-to-trackback code into a hook so that it is fired at ‘rebuild’. To do this in MT, you have to modify existing Perl making upgrading a problem.

To give you a brief example of the templates, here is the template that generates the link’o'list on the left

<h3>List O links</h3>
<% import time %>
<% datestr = '' %>
<% curdatestr = '' %>
<% for e in entries[:50]:
  curdatestr = time.strftime('%B %d, %Y',time.localtime(e.posted))
  if datestr <> curdatestr:
    datestr = curdatestr
    print '<h5>'+datestr+'</h5>'
  end
    print '<a class="listolinks" href="'+str(e.body)+'"
            title="'+str(e.extended)+'">'+str(e.title)+'</a>'
    if str(e.extended) <> 'None':
      print '<div class="lolextended">'+str(e.extended)+'</div>'
    end
    else:
      print '<div class="lolextended"></div>'
    end
end %>
<div class="powered">powered by <a
        href="http://www.kryogenix.org/code/vellum/">vellum</a></div>

Well done, Stuart, I know a lot of hard work has gone into this.

Stuart converts as days pass by to Vellum, a weblogging system.

Trust him on this one, Vellum is cool. I expect he shall reveal more later this week. FTO will convert at a later date. I’m looking forward to building some plugins for it.