Colin's Journal

Some very good news, which justifies another post, is that my work visa for next year has come through! This is always a nervous time of year because although there is no reason why my visa should not be renewed, there is always that nagging worry until you have it in hand.

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It’s been a busy few days in the life of my website. We are now paying for web hosting with Spenix, which means that we can have a proper website, better control over our email, and access for updates more easily.

This has (so far) been a very painless move – I just setup the new server through a web-based console, and then switched nameservers. The results are propagating through the DNS system – and soon the old version can be taken down!

Another big change is to move my weblog to a new system. My old one was based on a custom Java app that uses XSLT to populate the templates, and had a custom Swing GUI as the front end.

I’ve now written a new one in Python which uses wxPython for the front end, and a template language called TAL. TAL is used in Zope, but the implementation I’m using is written from scratch (I don’t want any Zope dependencies).

I’ve converted all my old weblog to the new system using a mixture of XSLT, Shell scripting, macros, and python. The result is that the old posts all look like they were made at 8pm, because the old system didn’t allow multiple posts in one day.

The final thing I need to do now is to create a couple of real templates so that the new weblog integrates with the old site properly…

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