Fine tuning

Since late last year I've started to get interested again in hardware hacking and the 'maker' movement, up to the point that I've been upgrading my home facilities for woodwork, metalwork, and electronics.

This resulted in my deciding to add a couple of new domains to my stable. One being a cetral resource for those looking for information (which, naturally enough, includes myself!) which is starting to take life at openhax.com in the form of a wiki. Once I've developed suitable templates for each typoe of link — and created some for the stuff I've already found — I'll open it up to others to add stuff too.

The second is another blog for myself, but focussed on my making and hacking. It could have been added here but I reckoned that it was a rather more 'special interest' topic so would suit a separate location. Anyway, if you'd like to see all that wander along to shehacks.com , though I'm still fine tuning the css!

Initially I was planning on using Concrete5 (again) for the new maker blog, but a poassing comment from someone at a meeting last week caused me to re-evaluate that decision and, eventually, I decided to return to Chyrp as is used for this blog. And to not re-use the existing fork but to update it to the latest version — four years after I last touched it! So far I've managed to upgrade three of my modules, and I'll be getting around to updating the rest shortly. They will all, of course, remain GPL'd as Open Source.

b0rkken

Yes, I discovered earlier today that I had broken my install here. Mea Culpa.

I hadn't realised earlier as I hadn't tried to add anything here for a while as I've been so busy and, not too surprisingly I suppose, I hadn't gone seeking any of the other pages on the site.

Anyway, when I updated the security setups on each of my machines — as part of a general upgrade of everything to be IPv6-compliant — I'd locked-down some of the options available within Apache, believing that none of the sites I operate required them. Seems I was wrong, however!

I've taken a temporary measure to make things available again and will find a different solution later to sort the original issue.

Oh, and yes, every site is now available through IPv6 as well as IPv4. Yay!

Another module

Say hello to another Chyrp module, 'ReadTwitter'. Last week I added in the — JavaScript — code as made available by Twitter to download items from your feed and display them on your site. Thing is, I personally often have scripting locked out on security grounds and I'm sure others do too. Taking into account that Twitter's code also includes the personal replies I make to other people in addition to my own posts and I realised I needed to write some code that would do the retrieve and display code on my server. Hence ReadTwitter! It retrieves the feed, disposes of the direct replies and caches the results (meaning that if Twitter is unavailable the 'latest' still is). Because I'm still not happy with the stability of Chyrp 2.0 RC2 yet, this module, like all of mine released so far, is presently for RC1 installations only.

Rollback

I've found a couple of showstoppers in trying to upgrade to RC2 of Chyrp so, after much burning of the 3am oil trying to find a way around them, I've rolled back everything to RC1 so that I can maintain a working blog. Hopefully the issues will get sorted and RC2 can take its rightful place soon™.

Fourth module

I released my fourth Chyrp module to the world today (though it hasn't taken that much notice so far with only one person downloading it!), Called Schnell it provides a way to easily and easily insert links and images — hence 'schnell' you see (the German for 'fast' if you didn't already know!). Anyway, like most everything else I code, it is actually something I designed to fill my own need and tweaked so that it could be made use of by others. And, of course, it is GPL'd too …

Modules

As I've been having some problems accessing the main Chyrp site to update my modules there (and add a new one) then I've created a new page here (called Chyrp natch!) with the details of what I've been up to and a place to download them from. All my tech stuff will get tagged " tech".

Guess this means that this site is going to have to become a 'real' one now rather than just my 'technological playground' and I shall have to leave my alisonw LiveJournal behind.

Oh dear … ;-P