Moving to ikiwiki

As many others, I’ve moved this blog to ikiwiki. In fact, I’ve moved my whole 3-page website to ikiwiki, and it only felt natural to migrate the blog as well (I may miss hobix’s webpage, though).

Anyway, this gives me a bit more flexibility when creating the RSS feeds, so I’ve now created a separate feed for Planet Debian (which won’t have only Debian-related content, mind you), and left the old RSS URL to include all posts, e.g. some more personal ones, or some that I’d find unsuitable for the planet. If you’re interested, here is the full feed.

I run ikiwiki in my laptop to generate static html, and rsync the generated output to the webserver. I have a Bazaar branch in my laptop as well, but it doesn’t interact with ikiwiki in any way. Finally, I’m very grateful that Joey committed this minutes after me mentioning on IRC, and I’m very grateful as well to whoever wrote the typography plugin.

Migrating the old blog wasn’t hard, just tedious and boring, particularly since I didn’t want to keep using Textile, but migrate to Markdown. I switched off usedirs to keep old URLs working (I’d rather not mess with redirections), and used the date option of the meta plugin, so that the “Posted” information for old entries when inlining would be accurate. This still left the “Last modified” timestamp in the individual pages wrong, so I just used a script that would change the mtime of the entries in the filesystem to their creation time.

One wart I’ve found is that I’m very used to having both a filename and a title for each entry, and have the filename just present in the navigation bar of the browser, and the title shown in big inside the page. You can do this in ikiwiki by using the title option of the meta plugin, and giving a H1 element in the entry content. However, this makes the H1 show in the RSS feed, which I had always noticed in Zack’s blog, and always found inconvenient. Oh well. It also makes for the same title to appear twice in the default [[inline]] page; to solve it, I just hide with CSS the H1 there — zack, e.g., does not use [[meta title]], and aligns the permalink to the right.

Update: So I was washing the dishes and it struck me: maybe with a conditional! And, effectively, it is possible, given that there is a convenient included test. So now I start my entries with:

  [[meta title="This is the long title"]]
  \[[if test="!included()"
       then="# This is the long title"]]

Yay!

Update (2007-12-27): Lars does it differently, by only providing \[[meta title]], and modifying the page template to include:

  <h1><TMPL_VAR TITLE></h1>

Update (2007-12-29): I finally decided, at least for now, that is cleaner not having the title duplicated in two lines, and went with a template. I didn’t want the <h1>title</h1> bit in all pages, though, and Joey pointed out that I could use a different template for blog entries using the pagetemplate plugin.