I’ve been thinking of putting together a web site for my illustration work, and threw together an install of wordpress at a subdirectory of another site. I fired it up and took a look at it and saw the default theme (“twenty ten”), and thought, “I’d like to change that to something I could design, or just something super simple that I could add my own images to.” I thought back to a long time ago when I’d put together a little art site using blosxom (remember blosxom?), and hacked up the very simple theme file to include a image of my own, colors of my own, simple stuff like that. It looked nice, simple but nice.
These days it’s not a little blosxom flavour file, it’s a WordPress theme, and it’s complicated. It’s a bunch of files full of PHP. I’ve tried in the past to hack WordPress themes, and I’ve always given up.
Another thing I’ve given up on is Rails. When Rails first came out, I was already a Ruby fan, so I was interested. I got a book on it and did some tutorials. The code generation (scaffolding) kind of bugged me. If you generate code, then hack it up, and then have to regenerate, you have to re-hack it? That seemed like bad abstraction to me. But then, scaffolding was supposed to be a temporary measure anyway. In any case, it made it inconvenient and weird. It was like you had to know before you started exactly how everything was going to go. They changed the code generation in later versions, so now you could let it generate scaffolding on-the-fly, and they had this new abstraction around setting up your databases, called “migrations.” “Later” versions are still pretty early, because I haven’t been in touch with Rails in a long time. Every time I look at it I look at the instructions for deploying it on Dreamhost and eventually give up, because I don’t want to think about it.
Of course I’d thought of trying Rails for the illustration site first, read some stuff about it on Dreamhost’s site, and given up, realizing I didn’t have the attention span for it. It’s come a long way without me and I just don’t have the spare time and willpower to catch up with it.
That’s the way with a lot of technologies I’ve been interested in at one point. I had a book on Cocoa programming for the Mac; read through it and understood most of it, not all of it… but even if I went back and learned it again, they’ve advanced it way beyond what it was when I read that book. There’s all kinds of new technologies involving things like automatic memory management and a thing called “Core Data” and other stuff. I could learn all that if it was my job, but not for my own sake.
That’s it, you know? The web used to be constructed out of materials that were simple enough that you could pick them up in your spare time. Not anymore. And it’s not just the web — lots of technologies have moved beyond a level where I can make them my own anymore.
Might as well just stick to services that do all the work for me, and I just add some content. Why do I even keep my own copy of wordpress here on goesping.org? Is there any reason in the world I should be doing this instead of just hosting it at wordpress.com? Answer: No.
I miss it though! I miss having a clue. I miss having some idea how to make pages that are actually my own and look OK. But you know, losing touch was a gradual process, starting when CSS and “DHTML” hit the shelves. I was never actually good at web design and programming. But I used to be able to fake it, and that fell away and now is long gone.
Check out pybloxsom, I’ve heard good things about it, and it’s “new”.
TwentyTen really isn’t that complicated at all, I can show you how to hack it in about 10 minutes. It just LOOKS complicated. :) Look me up if you want to.
Ed,
I’d say about the same thing as Topher. It looks much harder than it is. Once you get past a few basic hurdles, it’s a lot easier.
Here’s a basic “How to hack WordPress” article.
http://max.limpag.com/2006/04/09/wordpress-theme-guide-for-nongeeks/
OK, this is what I’m talking about. To install Blosxom, you took one file — blosxom.cgi — and installed it in your web directory.
To install pyblosxom, you do:
Install
=======
Install
-------
Single user install
-------------------
If you want to install PyBlosxom for a single user or want to install
it in a virtual environment where it can't get naughty with anything
else, use `virtualenv`_.
First build a virtual environment::
virtualenv --no-site-packages
Then activate the virtual environment::
Then install PyBlosxom using one of the instructions below.
.. _virtualenv: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/virtualenv
Installation
------------
If you have `distribute`_ and `pip`_ installed and want to do a
site-wide installation, do::
pip install pyblosxom
.. _distribute: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/distribute
.. _pip: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/pip
If you have `setuptools`_ installed and want to do a site-wide
installation, do::
easy_install pyblosxom
.. _setuptools: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/setuptools
You can download the tarball. Tarballs are at
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=67445 . Extract
the ``tar.gz`` file and run::
python setup.py install
Lastly, you can do an svn checkout. Instructions are at
http://sourceforge.net/scm/?type=svn&group_id=67445 . Generally,
*trunk* is unstable but any of the tags are stable. Then run::
python setup.py install
If none of those methods works for you, then you might want to
reconsider using PyBlosxom
Yeah I might want to reconsider, because none of that made a lick of sense to me. That’s what I hate about Python. The language as such is simple and beautiful, but installing anything to do with it is a maze of twisty passages, all alike.
Jim, I think I might check that out — I know I’m capable of learning this stuff intellectually, I just don’t know if I have the perseverance to make my way through it. :(
I totally feel the same way. I kind of got out of programming as a potential career when they wanted so much math for it, it didn’t make sense. I got out of programming personally when I realized there was just nothing I wanted or needed to make. I could do web stuff, hell I should, I want to do all sorts of cool things with our station like user logins, editable forms, web-based uploads, Etc. on until the morning.
I started looking at php, it was a combined book on php and sql. Right away it’s going, “OK make a database and you want to keep track of blah blah blah and …” I totally can’t bring myself to care. Sure I can learn it. If I sat down with some php and mysql tutorials, better than that book but I’m sure they’re out there, I could. And I’d probably have to in order to tackle the too big CMS systems, joomla and drupal. But seriously, I just can’t bring myself to care.
I have this project kicking around in my head, drone-based improv music based on part of a Pygmy hymn from Zaire. That’s way more interesting to me. I keep thinking, man I really should do that web stuff, it would be totally cool to have it done. And we don’t have the money to pay for it, that’s for damn sure. But the effort involved in learning all the technology is just .. I can’t see the point, you know? I’d rather figure out how to record the giant singing bowl full of water well enough that it captures the deep drone, plus the random droplets of water splashing back into the bowl without accidentally frying a microphone.