It's only RSS but I like it!#
- I wanted to play with publicfolder, but I couldn't find the files I was saving either in the AWS console or Transmit (which can read and write to S3). publicfolder was showing no errors, either on the command line or in the Electron app.#
- I then went to the aws cli, which can list files in a bucket with 'aws s3 ls s3://bucketname/ ', and it gave me the mysterious output 'PRE /'.#
- I eventually found the files with 'aws s3 ls s3://bucketname/ --recursive', which showed me my files had been saved with a slash as the first character of the filename. ❓#
- To make a long story short, in the config for publicfolder I had forgotten the trailing slash for "watchfolder" (of course the sample config includes the trailing slash). By changing it from "/Users/shanson/myFolder" to "/Users/shanson/myFolder/", the bad files were deleted from S3 and files with proper filenames were uploaded.#
- Watch your slashes!#
- Today is the highlight of the Christmas holiday in Germany, so I won't be doing much drumming today. 🎄#
- How does 11ty handle the data from the OPML blog outline? There is a Markdown template, with some variables in Nunjucks format. 11ty can mix and match template formats, even within the same file. #
- Here's a simplified view of the template (leaving out the pagination commands)#
- --#
- permalink: 'archives/{{ page.title | slug }}/'#
- layout: post#
- eleventyComputed:#
- title: '{{page.title}}'#
- ---#
- {{page.content | safe}}#
- Pretty simple. The date gets pulled in without even having to mention it!#
- Here's my first working version to parse an OPML blog outline to "11ty" Markdown templates #
- Fetch the outline from drummer.scripting.com#
- With opml.parse read the outline into an object#
- Find all nodes with type of 'outline' that have subs (as an array, I'm ignoring titleless posts for now)#
- For each node#
- title is the node text#
- date is the created attribute (as a Date object)#
- Create a textArray of the text of all subs (ignoring hierarchy for now) #
- Append the textArray entries to a body string separated by two returns (one return if within a code block, designated with "```" Markdown syntax)#
- Push {title, date, body} to a results array#
- Return the results array to 11ty #
- This array can be used by 11ty as data in a paginated template (pagination is an 11ty feature to render several files from a single template).#
- I couldn't get much done today, since our electicity was out most of the day. We are having photovoltaik panels installed on our roof, and needed a new breaker box installed. Everything came back on, except now a hallway light is always on and is no longer on the switch! Good thing the electrican is back tomorrow! 😃#
- However before the power was shut off I was able to put my opml code into an 11ty (that's how the cool kids spell Eleventy) JavaScript data file to pull blog posts from OPML into a JavaScript object that 11ty can use in its templates. It works in a test blog and it works locally in my blog code. So we're almost there!#
- I ended up using the opml package, since I can grok JavaScript objects better than I can an XML parser.#
- And lo and behold, I was not only able to search the object for all items with type==="outline", but I was also able to write a recursive function to get the text items from inside those items, even when nested. I didn't even have to look up anything on Stack Overflow! Hooray for me!#
- So now I have pretty much everything I need to pull OPML into Eleventy to stitch together blog posts. #
- The opml npm package can create a JavaScript object from an outline. That's a great start!#
- The opmlparser npm package is older, but it's what Andrew Shell used for his Gatsby plugin, so I have some example code to steal from. #
- When setting up a static-site generator (SSG) to interoperate with Drummer, it looks like there are two choices for how to save the posts in the SSG. #
- One would be to have the SSG fetch and parse the outline itself, then produce posts from the parsed outline. This is what I was doing in my Gatsby approach. (Alternatively we could push the outline to the SSG rather than fetching.)#
- The other is to have Drummer itself push Markdown files to the SSG. This can be easily organized with scripts in Drummer.#
- I don't know yet which approach is better. I suspect that perhaps parsing the OPML is better, then we can take advantage of the attributes in the outline.#
- I've just forked my main blog (which I started back in 1999 on editthispage.com) from "papascott.de" to "scotthanson.de". I've been moving my digital identity from 'papascott' to 'scotthanson' over the past few months. The blog was one of the last pieces. #
- Another piece was my GitHub account, which I switched from 'papascott' to 'scotthansonde'. The repositories get redirected, but I put up a temporary placeholder account at 'papascott' to point to the renamed account. #
- A last piece is my private Gmail address, which frankly may not be worth the bother. #
- Musical inspiration: The Ting Tings#
- I'm going to try to start using Electric Drummer in my daily work. I can use this space to take notes for myself (and not just for silly tests as I've done up to now).#
- I've made a folder for my own outlines in my Documents folder, that seems likes a good start.#
- Uploading a Markdown file from Electric Drummer works as well as in Web Drummer (provided you've put your tokens in localStorage).#
- Just noticed... if in Daytona you find an entry in the Change Notes, hit the eye icon to open in the entry in Drummer, then hit the eye icon in Drummer, it opens the blog entry. Nice! #
- "curly"#
And another day begins... what will it bring? #
- That build hook URL for Netlify requires a POST request. But Drummer lets you run a script from the Iconbar. Here's mine.#
- I've been thinking about how to use Drummer outlines in a static site generator, like Gatsby or Eleventy. They generally generate content from markdown files, so it must be possible to either export OPML to markdown or for the site generator read content directly from OPML.#
- I found some demo code by Andrew Shell for a Gatsby plugin to generate content from a Little Outliner outline. On a whim I forked it to my own repository and plugged in the URL for a Drummer outline. And it worked! It rendered the basic text of the outline entries, and I was able to deploy the site to Netlify. #
- Going one step further, on Netlify I set up a build hook for the site, and in Drummer put a script on my Iconbar to send a POST request to the build hook URL. And voilà! I have a build button my for Gatsby test site. It is, of course, a lot slower than OldSchool. 😃 #
- There is of course a lot of work left before this will be usable, but for a beginning I'm pretty happy with it. Thank you Andrew for posting your demo code!#
- That German word is literally "experience of success", but a better translation would be "feeling of achievement". And I just had one!#
For over 10 years the banking software (that we use for both home and business) on my Mac has used a card reader to authenticate. The reader is so old it has a serial cable with a USB adapter attached. Every time MacOS updates I've been afraid the device will no longer be recognized. More annoying, when we're on the road it's a bulky device to have to pack along, especially for only one purpose. #- I should mention that Germany has its own protocol to communicate online with banks (FinTS, formerly known as HBCI). So I can only use German banking software, and my German might be pretty good, reading a 200 page handbook or protocol specification in my second language is a bit of a barrier. #
This has bothered me for years, and in the meantime there other ways to authenticate (e.g. using a smartphone to read a generated TAN graphic, used by our bank) that don't involve extra and outdated devices. In fact German law now requires banks to use Two-Factor Authentication (2FA, I guess the card reader still qualifies). But I was afraid of trying to change the authentication method, I was afraid of losing 13 years of banking data that I had on my local machine! #- Yesterday I decided to test changing the authentication. I set up a new account with the "photoTAN" authentication, and to my surprise the banking software applied the authentication to my existing account and it just worked! It took just 5 minutes, and now I'm free from my card reader! #
- So I guess sometimes when you come to a fork in the road you just have to take it! #
- I could say it feels like only yesterday, but no, that's not true anymore. It now feels longer ago than that, and that's good.#
- Thanks to blogging I can look up my notes from that day. "I just feel numb. I miss an eloquent President, who can express what I and the nation must feel, but cannot put into words."#
- We do business in Hamburg-Harburg, just blocks from Marienstrasse 54, where the plot was hatched. It is still creepy to me that this began so (geographically) close to us.#
Almost immediately there were many expressions of grief and support from both German officials and ordinary citizens. This led directly to the German military involvement in Afghanistan that started a few weeks later. #- Peace!#
What will the world bring today?#
- My adventure today has been running drummerCMS on my local Mac. It pretty much worked out of the box.#
- I git cloned the repository, ran npm install, then started the server with `node drummercms.js`, and noted it was running on port 1410. I figured the URL to build would be
"http://localhost:1410/build?blog=myTwitterName" and sure enough, it wrote out a data directory and tried to write files to S3 (which failed, of course, because I can't write to the "oldschool.scripting.com" bucket 😂).# - Then I had to remember (or look up) how to set up my own S3 bucket for static site hosting and change a couple config variables in drummercms.js#
- var basePath = "/drummer.papascott.de/" # My bucket name, without a subdirectory for my Twitter name #
- const appDomain = "drummer.papascott.de" # The domain I've pointed to the bucket #
- Actually that's probably a stupid name for the domain, since Drummer is the system, not the blog! 😛#
- And I can view my blog under http://drummer.papascott.de.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/
(http://drummer.papascott.de/ doesn't work on my Mac yet, but does on my phone. Must be some weird DNS caching voodoo 🤷♂️)(Yep, that's what it was, in my router.) # - Note I am not changing any header settings on blog.opml itself. I want Drummer itself to keep working as usual.#
- Update 2022-05-29: Corrected the URL to build... I had omitted the '/build?'#
Can I put my own index.html template on GitHub? We'll see!#
Yes, it works. Then it gets pushed to Netlify where it is statically served#
- I created a new repository DrummerTest on GitHub, and cloned it to my Mac.#
- There I created a file templates/index.html, and copied in the default Drummer Template, making a trivial change to the HTML title to make sure Drummer was using the new template. #
- I pushed my changes to GitHub. It would be possible for Drummer to get the template from GitHub using a raw.githubusercontent.com URL, but that always takes a few minutes to update, so it's not so convenient.#
- So I set up a free Netlify site connected to the DrummerTest repository. That means the Netlify site will update every time changes are pushed to GitHub. It takes about 5 seconds. #
- Netlify gave me a crazy URL https://brave-kirch-962987.netlify.app/templates/index.html, which I set as the urlTemplate OPML header on my blog.opml.#
- It worked! For now I've only changed the HTML title, but next I'll be tweaking the styles.#
Wake me up when September ends. Or whatever.#
- And I promise to play nicely from now on.#
It's only RSS but I like it!#
- I wanted to play with publicfolder, but I couldn't find the files I was saving either in the AWS console or Transmit (which can read and write to S3). publicfolder was showing no errors, either on the command line or in the Electron app.#
- I then went to the aws cli, which can list files in a bucket with 'aws s3 ls s3://bucketname/ ', and it gave me the mysterious output 'PRE /'.#
- I eventually found the files with 'aws s3 ls s3://bucketname/ --recursive', which showed me my files had been saved with a slash as the first character of the filename. ❓#
- To make a long story short, in the config for publicfolder I had forgotten the trailing slash for "watchfolder" (of course the sample config includes the trailing slash). By changing it from "/Users/shanson/myFolder" to "/Users/shanson/myFolder/", the bad files were deleted from S3 and files with proper filenames were uploaded.#
- Watch your slashes!#
- Today is the highlight of the Christmas holiday in Germany, so I won't be doing much drumming today. 🎄#
- How does 11ty handle the data from the OPML blog outline? There is a Markdown template, with some variables in Nunjucks format. 11ty can mix and match template formats, even within the same file. #
- Here's a simplified view of the template (leaving out the pagination commands)#
- --#
- permalink: 'archives/{{ page.title | slug }}/'#
- layout: post#
- eleventyComputed:#
- title: '{{page.title}}'#
- ---#
- {{page.content | safe}}#
- Pretty simple. The date gets pulled in without even having to mention it!#
- Here's my first working version to parse an OPML blog outline to "11ty" Markdown templates #
- Fetch the outline from drummer.scripting.com#
- With opml.parse read the outline into an object#
- Find all nodes with type of 'outline' that have subs (as an array, I'm ignoring titleless posts for now)#
- For each node#
- title is the node text#
- date is the created attribute (as a Date object)#
- Create a textArray of the text of all subs (ignoring hierarchy for now) #
- Append the textArray entries to a body string separated by two returns (one return if within a code block, designated with "```" Markdown syntax)#
- Push {title, date, body} to a results array#
- Return the results array to 11ty #
- This array can be used by 11ty as data in a paginated template (pagination is an 11ty feature to render several files from a single template).#
- I couldn't get much done today, since our electicity was out most of the day. We are having photovoltaik panels installed on our roof, and needed a new breaker box installed. Everything came back on, except now a hallway light is always on and is no longer on the switch! Good thing the electrican is back tomorrow! 😃#
- However before the power was shut off I was able to put my opml code into an 11ty (that's how the cool kids spell Eleventy) JavaScript data file to pull blog posts from OPML into a JavaScript object that 11ty can use in its templates. It works in a test blog and it works locally in my blog code. So we're almost there!#
- I ended up using the opml package, since I can grok JavaScript objects better than I can an XML parser.#
- And lo and behold, I was not only able to search the object for all items with type==="outline", but I was also able to write a recursive function to get the text items from inside those items, even when nested. I didn't even have to look up anything on Stack Overflow! Hooray for me!#
- So now I have pretty much everything I need to pull OPML into Eleventy to stitch together blog posts. #
- The opml npm package can create a JavaScript object from an outline. That's a great start!#
- The opmlparser npm package is older, but it's what Andrew Shell used for his Gatsby plugin, so I have some example code to steal from. #
- When setting up a static-site generator (SSG) to interoperate with Drummer, it looks like there are two choices for how to save the posts in the SSG. #
- One would be to have the SSG fetch and parse the outline itself, then produce posts from the parsed outline. This is what I was doing in my Gatsby approach. (Alternatively we could push the outline to the SSG rather than fetching.)#
- The other is to have Drummer itself push Markdown files to the SSG. This can be easily organized with scripts in Drummer.#
- I don't know yet which approach is better. I suspect that perhaps parsing the OPML is better, then we can take advantage of the attributes in the outline.#
- I've just forked my main blog (which I started back in 1999 on editthispage.com) from "papascott.de" to "scotthanson.de". I've been moving my digital identity from 'papascott' to 'scotthanson' over the past few months. The blog was one of the last pieces. #
- Another piece was my GitHub account, which I switched from 'papascott' to 'scotthansonde'. The repositories get redirected, but I put up a temporary placeholder account at 'papascott' to point to the renamed account. #
- A last piece is my private Gmail address, which frankly may not be worth the bother. #
- Musical inspiration: The Ting Tings#
- I'm going to try to start using Electric Drummer in my daily work. I can use this space to take notes for myself (and not just for silly tests as I've done up to now).#
- I've made a folder for my own outlines in my Documents folder, that seems likes a good start.#
- Uploading a Markdown file from Electric Drummer works as well as in Web Drummer (provided you've put your tokens in localStorage).#
- Just noticed... if in Daytona you find an entry in the Change Notes, hit the eye icon to open in the entry in Drummer, then hit the eye icon in Drummer, it opens the blog entry. Nice! #
- "curly"#
And another day begins... what will it bring? #
- That build hook URL for Netlify requires a POST request. But Drummer lets you run a script from the Iconbar. Here's mine.#
- I've been thinking about how to use Drummer outlines in a static site generator, like Gatsby or Eleventy. They generally generate content from markdown files, so it must be possible to either export OPML to markdown or for the site generator read content directly from OPML.#
- I found some demo code by Andrew Shell for a Gatsby plugin to generate content from a Little Outliner outline. On a whim I forked it to my own repository and plugged in the URL for a Drummer outline. And it worked! It rendered the basic text of the outline entries, and I was able to deploy the site to Netlify. #
- Going one step further, on Netlify I set up a build hook for the site, and in Drummer put a script on my Iconbar to send a POST request to the build hook URL. And voilà! I have a build button my for Gatsby test site. It is, of course, a lot slower than OldSchool. 😃 #
- There is of course a lot of work left before this will be usable, but for a beginning I'm pretty happy with it. Thank you Andrew for posting your demo code!#
- That German word is literally "experience of success", but a better translation would be "feeling of achievement". And I just had one!#
- For over 10 years the banking software (that we use for both home and business) on my Mac has used a card reader to authenticate. The reader is so old it has a serial cable with a USB adapter attached. Every time MacOS updates I've been afraid the device will no longer be recognized. More annoying, when we're on the road it's a bulky device to have to pack along, especially for only one purpose. #
- I should mention that Germany has its own protocol to communicate online with banks (FinTS, formerly known as HBCI). So I can only use German banking software, and my German might be pretty good, reading a 200 page handbook or protocol specification in my second language is a bit of a barrier. #
- This has bothered me for years, and in the meantime there other ways to authenticate (e.g. using a smartphone to read a generated TAN graphic, used by our bank) that don't involve extra and outdated devices. In fact German law now requires banks to use Two-Factor Authentication (2FA, I guess the card reader still qualifies). But I was afraid of trying to change the authentication method, I was afraid of losing 13 years of banking data that I had on my local machine! #
- Yesterday I decided to test changing the authentication. I set up a new account with the "photoTAN" authentication, and to my surprise the banking software applied the authentication to my existing account and it just worked! It took just 5 minutes, and now I'm free from my card reader! #
- So I guess sometimes when you come to a fork in the road you just have to take it! #
- I could say it feels like only yesterday, but no, that's not true anymore. It now feels longer ago than that, and that's good.#
- Thanks to blogging I can look up my notes from that day. "I just feel numb. I miss an eloquent President, who can express what I and the nation must feel, but cannot put into words."#
- We do business in Hamburg-Harburg, just blocks from Marienstrasse 54, where the plot was hatched. It is still creepy to me that this began so (geographically) close to us.#
- Almost immediately there were many expressions of grief and support from both German officials and ordinary citizens. This led directly to the German military involvement in Afghanistan that started a few weeks later. #
- Peace!#
What will the world bring today?#
- My adventure today has been running drummerCMS on my local Mac. It pretty much worked out of the box.#
- I git cloned the repository, ran npm install, then started the server with `node drummercms.js`, and noted it was running on port 1410. I figured the URL to build would be
"http://localhost:1410/build?blog=myTwitterName" and sure enough, it wrote out a data directory and tried to write files to S3 (which failed, of course, because I can't write to the "oldschool.scripting.com" bucket 😂).# - Then I had to remember (or look up) how to set up my own S3 bucket for static site hosting and change a couple config variables in drummercms.js#
- var basePath = "/drummer.papascott.de/" # My bucket name, without a subdirectory for my Twitter name #
- const appDomain = "drummer.papascott.de" # The domain I've pointed to the bucket #
- Actually that's probably a stupid name for the domain, since Drummer is the system, not the blog! 😛#
- And I can view my blog under http://drummer.papascott.de.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/
(http://drummer.papascott.de/ doesn't work on my Mac yet, but does on my phone. Must be some weird DNS caching voodoo 🤷♂️)(Yep, that's what it was, in my router.) # - Note I am not changing any header settings on blog.opml itself. I want Drummer itself to keep working as usual.#
- Update 2022-05-29: Corrected the URL to build... I had omitted the '/build?'#
Can I put my own index.html template on GitHub? We'll see!#
Yes, it works. Then it gets pushed to Netlify where it is statically served#
- I created a new repository DrummerTest on GitHub, and cloned it to my Mac.#
- There I created a file templates/index.html, and copied in the default Drummer Template, making a trivial change to the HTML title to make sure Drummer was using the new template. #
- I pushed my changes to GitHub. It would be possible for Drummer to get the template from GitHub using a raw.githubusercontent.com URL, but that always takes a few minutes to update, so it's not so convenient.#
- So I set up a free Netlify site connected to the DrummerTest repository. That means the Netlify site will update every time changes are pushed to GitHub. It takes about 5 seconds. #
- Netlify gave me a crazy URL https://brave-kirch-962987.netlify.app/templates/index.html, which I set as the urlTemplate OPML header on my blog.opml.#
- It worked! For now I've only changed the HTML title, but next I'll be tweaking the styles.#
Wake me up when September ends. Or whatever.#
- And I promise to play nicely from now on.#