Heri io e mi sponsa ha accompaniate mi filios al cinema, pro guardar le film "The Lego Movie 2". Isto es un film de animation tridimensional que, como le titulo suggere, narra le aventuras de nostre amate minifiguras Lego.

Il es possibile que isto sia causate da mi basse expectationes, ma io confessa que le film me placeva multo, e in alicun momentos esseva multo plus profunde de altere filmes mirate a un publico plus adulte. E a iste puncto io vos consilia de stoppar le lectura de iste entrata, si vos plana de guardar le film: io va revelar alicun partes del historia, e si vos non vole que vostre surprisa sia guastate, stoppa de leger me hic.

(A iste puncto uno poterea demandar se qual es le senso de parlar vos de iste film, viste que illo obviemente non es interessante pro vos; ma io non va poner me iste question, e continua.)

Lo que plus me colpava es un drammatic colpo de scena (inexpectate inversion del eventos) que mirabilemente presenta un confusion del conceptos de bon e perfide: in breve, isto occurre quando Emmet, le protagonista, es sur le puncto de liberar su amate Lucy e altere su amicos qui esseva captivate per le folle e perfide habitantes de un planeta lontan. Il es in iste momento, que Lucy comprende que illes non del toto es folle e perfide, ma sinceremente amicabile; illa comprende que illa esseva victima de un mal comprension causate per su prejudicios, e alora illa cerca, inutilemente, de convincer Emmet a abandonar su plano de destruction de iste population extra-terrestre.

Iste momento es terribilemente actual, mesmo in le terminologia usate, quando Emmet accusa Lucy de haber essite le victima de un lavage del cerebro (anglese: brainwashing) que la impedi de vider le realitate, sin realisar que il es proprio ille, le qui ha un vision completemente distorte del realitate e ha totalmente invertite le conceptos de ben e mal.

Iste passage ben describe le problema del incommunicabilitate inter personas qui ha ideas opposite e qui es profundemente convincite que le altere non comprende, e que nos ha le mission de portar le al veritate. Un tema que es sempre actual, e jammais solvite.

Complexivemente, le film es multo agradabile, con multe action, un poco de comicitate, e anque alicun momentos multo toccante emotivemente — benque isto pote esser causate del facto que io, in guardar le film con mi filios, empathisava con illes e projectava super me lor emotiones (o melio: lo que io imaginava esser lor emotiones). Un hora e medie que io non regretta haber passate in le cinema!

Good news for the intrepid photographers! Imaginario is now available for Windows and MacOS — in addition to Linux, of course. Don't believe me? Here's a couple of screenshots, then:

(click on the image to enlarge it)

Of course, this does not mean that I'm inviting everyone to start using it: Imaginario is still alpha quality. While it shouldn't just randomly delete your photos, there are many rough edges here and there, so use it with extreme caution.

Still, I'll appreciate if someone having access to these capitalistic operating systems could give a quick try to Imaginario (you can download it from here) and let me know if it starts at all. In case you wish to further explore it, you'll unavodably stumble upon a lot of bugs; you can also let me know about them.

It took a few days, but I've finally migrated my site to Nikola. I used to have blog.mardy.it served by Google's Blogger, the main sections of www.mardy.it generated with Jekyll, the image gallery served by the old and glorious Gallery2, plus a few leftovers from the old Drupal site.

discussion by Nicolas Alejandro, on Flickr

While Jekyll is cool, I was immediately captivated by Nikola's ease of use and by its developers' promptness in answering questions in the forum. Also, one nice thing about Nikola (and Pelican, too) which I forgot to mention in my previous post is it's support for multilingual sites. I guess I'll have to translate this post in interlingua too, to give you a demonstration. :-)

Anyway, while I've fallen in love with static site generators, I still would like to give people the chance of leaving comments. Services like Disqus are easy to integrate, but given the way they can be (ab)used to track the users, I prefered to go for something self hosted. So, enter Isso.

Isso is a Python server to handle comments; it's simple to install and configure, and offers some nice features like e-mail notifications on new replies.

My Isso setup

Integrating Isso with Nikola was relatively easy, but the desire to keep a multilingual site and some hosting limitation made the process worth spending a couple of words.

FastCGI

First, my site if hosted by Dreamhost with a very basic subscription that doesn't allow me to keep long-running processes. After reading Isso's quickstart guide I was left quite disappointed, because it seemed that the only way to use Isso is to have it running all the time, or have a nginx server (Dreamhost offers Apache). Luckily, that's not quite the case, and more deployment approach are described in a separate page, including one for FastCGI (which is supported by Dreamhost). Those instructions are a bit wrong, but yours truly submitted some amendments to the documentation which will hopefully go live soon.

Importing comments

Isso can import comments from other sites, but an importer for Blogger (a.k.a. blogspot.com) was missing. So I wrote a quick and dirty tool for that job, and shared it in case it could be useful to someone else, too.

Multilingual sites

The default configuration of Nikola + Isso binds the comments to the exact URL that they were entered into. What I mean is that if your site supports multiple languages, and a user has entered a comment to an entry while visiting the English version of the site, users visiting the Italian version of the site would see same blog entry, but without that comment. That happens regardless of whether the blog entry has been translated into multiple languages or not: it's enough that the site has been configured for multiple languages.

My solution to fix the issue could not be accepted into Nikola as it would break old comments in existing sites, but if you are starting a new multilingual site you should definitely consider it.

Testers welcome

Given that I've deployed Isso as a CGI, it's understandable that it's not the fastest thing ever: it takes some time to startup, so comments don't appear immediately when you open a page. However, once it's started it stays alive for several seconds, and that seems to help with performance when commenting.

Anyway, the real reason why I've written all this is to kindly ask you to write a comment on this post :-) Extra points if you leave your e-mail address and enable the reply notifications, and let me know if you receive a notification once I'll reply to your comment. As far as I understand, you won't get a notification when someone adds an unrelated comment, but only when the "reply" functionality is used.

But really, should the commenting system be completely broken, I'm sure you'll find a way to contact me, if you need to. :-)

Le informazioni che arrivano dal Venezuela dipingono Maduro come un dittatore che affama il suo popolo; altri invece ritengono che lo stia eroicamente difendendo contro l'imperialismo americano. Cercando di sfuggire dalla propaganda del potere, ma anche di non idealizzare un capo di stato che ha grosse responsabilità sulla situazione del suo paese, mi sono imbattuto in questo articolo interessante, scritto da un giornalista che ben conosce il Venezuela: leggilo qui.

In the last few days I've been writing a simple website for Imaginario. I'm a terrible site designer, and I can't really say that I enjoy writing websites, but it's something that from time to time people might need to do. While the PhotoTeleport website is built with Jekyll, this time I decided to try some other static site generator, in order to figure out if Jekyll is indeed the best for me, or if there are better alternatives for my (rather basic) needs.

I set out trying a couple of Python-based generators, Pelican and Nikola. Here is a brief review of them (and of Jekyll), in case it helps someone else make their own choice.

Jekyll

I've been using it since several months for the PhotoTeleport website, which features a news section and a handful of static pages. It does the job very well and I haven't any major complaint. It's very popular and there are plenty of plugins to customize its behaviour or add new functionality. The documentation is sufficient for a basic usage of the site, and information on how to solve more specific issues can easily be found in the internet.

My only issue is that it's not totally intuitive to use, and in order to customize the interactions for your own needs you need to write your own scripts — at least, I didn't find a ready solution to create a new post, or deploy the generated content into my site.

Pelican

My first impression with Pelican has been extremely positive: it's very easy to setup and start a blog. It's also quite popular, even though not as much as Jekyll, and there are may themes for it. By looking at the themes, though, I quickly realized that Pelican is meant to be used for blogs, and not for simple static sites. I'm almost sure that there must be a way to use it to create a static site, maybe with some tweaking, but I couldn't find information about this in its documentation. A quick search in the internet didn't help either, so I gave up and moved to the next one.

If I had to write a blog I'd certainly consider it, though.

Nikola

Nikola is definitely less popular than Jekyll or Pelican, at least if we trust the number of stars and forks in GitHub, but it's still a popular and maintained project, with many plugins. Like Jekyll, it can handle both blogs and sites, or a combination of the two. It's well documented, the people in the forum are helpful, and its command line interface is simpler and more intuitive than Jekyll's. Also, the live preview functionality seems to be more advanced than Jekyll's, in that the browser is told to automatically reload the page whenever the site is rebuilt.

You can see my progress with the Imaginario website by inspecting the commits in its repository; you'll see how easy it was to set it up, and hopefully following my steps you'll save some time should you decide to create your own site with Nikola.

Overall, I'd rate Jekyll and Nikola on the same level: Jekyll wins for the wider community and amount of available plugins, while Nikola wins for the better command line interactions, and the fact that it's in Python gives me better confidence should I ever need to modify it deeply (though, admittedly, the latter is just a personal preference — Ruby developers will say the opposite).