New dev blog, with PluXml

Paul Kocialkowski — Mon, 25 Jun 2012 19:18:00 +0200

So, I decided to start out a new dev blog, focused on software (and sometime hardware) development I'm doing. Currently, it mostly takes place in the Replicant project, a fully free Android derivate. I'm hoping I'll get to Coreboot development soon, even though it seems quite hard at first sight.

I used to write on http://blog.paulk.fr, but that was in french and so did limit a lot the scope of people able to read my posts. I'll probably keep writing there sometimes, but probably for non-technical stuff (there is a wide range of subjects that I'd be interested to talk about).

For this blog, I decided, for a change, to use a non-mysql blog engine. I would gladely have used heavy engines as Dotclear or Wordpress, if any of these supported sqlite (which is way easier to handle for personal-use blogs as mine). Anyway, I got to PluXml and gave it a try. It's apparently written by a bunch of frenchies (the comments on the code are in french). I had to do a couple of personal modifications to make it fit my expectations.

First thing is about the theme: the default one is IMO kinda ugly. As I didn't want to spend the crazy amount of time that creating a theme from scratch requires, I just picked a good-looking one and did a few changes. The theme is called Mystique. I think it was designed for Wordpress (as it's used on coreboot blog) but then got ported to PluXml. After small changes (that I won't list there, because I already forgot about half of them), I came up with something good enough for my daily use on this blog. The result is available for download at: http://download.paulk.fr/pluxml/mystique.tar.gz and should be GPLv2-licensed.

About PluXml code changes, I made a diff from someone's code that I found on a forum (the author is given in the source code). It permits to have a tags cloud. It's available there: http://download.paulk.fr/pluxml/tagArtsList.diff. Last change I did is a new function to list the articles taged with a particular tag. The code is used to show selected posts on the top bar of the blog. It's available as well: http://download.paulk.fr/pluxml/artTagsCloud.diff under the GPLv2+ license.

Paul Kocialkowski's coding blog - Tag xml

New dev blog, with PluXml