Geany-Plugins - the fast and lightweight website?

Some of you maybe already noticed, the new plugins.geany.org is online since a few weeks now. Time to go in detail and tell some things about the techniques this site is working with, since it is based on a really interesting idea: self-generating content.

For the unpatient reader: the source is completely available on SourceForge, I'm not going to explain it in detail here, so feel free to contact me in case of any questions.

The idea was to also think of future development of the Geany-Plugins project itself. It is a collection of plugins for Geany and includes a lot of very cool plugins. They weren't much first, but while working on the website I noticed them getting more and more and thought of keeping efforts low with some automagical automatism. Then I found, that most developers actually write there README files in a special way: restructuredText. That was the day the idea was born to get the content from the README files.

There were not much tools I was using, rst2html, (X)HTML Tidy and - of course - Geany itself. Not to forget to mention the operating systems Fedora and Debian and a lot of Unix tools, anything free software and open source, certainly.

On basis of this idea, you can see the result now on plugins2.geany.org, which is something like the preview site for plugins.geany.org (If you miss any content on plugins.geany.org feel free to kick my butt to push the changes from plugins2.geany.org to the live site).

plugins2.geany.org is updated nightly by a cron job which is executing the shell script you can find in the sources. And the shell script is doing some simple things:

• Checkout or update a working copy of geany plugins
• scan the working copy for directories containing a README file
• hope this README file is written in restructuredText and generate HTML source from it
• tidy up the HTML source a bit using HTML tidy
  
• put the name of the found directory into navigation bar
• put the whole bunch of generated content to plugins2.geany.org

Well, now it's on the visitors turn, to give feedback on the site, in case you're missing anything or there is something wrong or to improve.

 

Nur noch soviel mal schlafen

Software Freedom Day 2010, Hamburg

18. September 2010. Die Welt im Ausnahmezustand. Nerds versammeln sich zum Rudelgucken. Vorträge über das Arbeiten mit der Kommandozeile; Hintergrunddienste die Musik abspielen, Texteditoren und reguläre Ausdrücke sind an der Tagesordnung (Die ganze Galerie, danke, Sven).

Selbst die FSFE war unter den Ausstellern mit einem Stand vertreten und hat dabei wieder die Aufmerksamkeit mit Flyern, netten Accessoires und Kleidungsstücken auf sich gelenkt. Selbst bei Vorträgen haben engagierte Leute heimlich das Logo oder die Internetadresse vor die Kamera gebracht.

Wie man so einen Rummel um ein paar Bits und Bytes machen kann? Ganz einfach: Free Software, Free Society.

(Ja, ich gebe zu, dieser Blog-Eintrag ist einzig und allein um Bilder zu zeigen, die beweisen dass Nerds soziale Kontakte pflegen, Freiheit lieben und sogar politische Arbeit leisten, und das nicht gerade wenig. Und wenn die SD-Karte in meinem Handy nicht genau in dem Moment, in dem ich es mit dem Rechner verbunden habe, angefangen hätte zu erzählen, sie wäre kaputt, hätte ich vielleicht sogar mehr davon. grml.)