We’re doing a major overhaul on an eXist-DB system we built for the Swedish Federation of Farmers. There’s a bit of everything in this one. There’s XProc running nightly conversions and on-demand publishing with FO, an oXygen editing environment based on DocBook, and XForms and XQuery for various administrative tasks. It’s a pretty cool system already, and now we’re making it better.
Looking forward to this one.
It’s January and the annual Göteborg Film Festival is almost here. I’m writing this from the projection booth of the Draken theatre, once a palace of wonders but now an abused locale for digital images. It’s sad to be here and yet I can’t quite seem to keep away.
Spent some time today teaching my both kids how to drive. Fun but exhausting.
Getting rid of this ftp problem (see my previous post about updating WordPress) was harder than I thought. The answer was right in front of me, though. IF I had bothered to read the readme file rather than abusing Google, that is.
This is a LOT better than using ftp or uploading plugins and themes manually.
WordPress says I need to provide ftp access for it, if I want to install plugins or update the software. What is this, the dark ages?
Yesterday I got myself a shiny new low-end VPS at VPSDime to host my sgmlguru.org site. For now, I’ve installed WordPress (to which I am considering moving the blog you’re reading now, if it all pans out) and maybe some other stuff. We’ll see.
I used to host sgmlguru.org in my basement, using an old Debian box and a dynamic DNS feature in my VDSL router. The site would go down at regular intervals, sometimes because I got a new IP address and the DynDNS service didn’t follow, and sometimes because that box runs Debian Unstable and I’m an apt-get junkie, updating the system at least a couple of times a week.
This was rather unreliable and didn’t reflect on my internet presence very favourably, so yesterday I finally had enough and bought myself a $7/month VPS at VPSDime. Nothing fancy, just Debian 7 with 6GB RAM running on OpenVZ. While I’m not a expert by any means, I do have some command line experience on Debian, so setting up a basic server with WordPress and some other stuff via SSH was extremely easy.
I have to say I’m really, really pleased.
I finally got an approval from my boss to attend XML Prague 2015 and registered for it the other day. I’m not presenting this time around, just listening and learning, and looking very much forward to it.
Noting it’s been two months since I last wrote anything here, I feel it is time to add the following:
If you hoped for a new version of ProXist (as hinted by a previous blog entry), sorry. It has not happened yet. It will, eventually.
If you expected something else from me, sorry again. It has not happened yet. It might, if I find out what you’re on about.
Contact me if you want blame assigned.
For the last few days, I’ve been busy updating ProXist, my XProc abstraction layer and app for eXist. There is a new(-ish) XProc package for eXist that promises to support a lot of (Norm Walsh’s XProc engine) Calabash’s capabilities, so I decided it was time to test it out and do a new ProXist at the same time.
My XML Prague ProXist version supported only my custom document type and stylesheets, and barely those at that. It was meant to be a demo. For the new version, though, I’m thinking of doing a default implementation for DocBook, including some of the more commonly used stylesheets and a couple of standard pipelines, packaged so they can be used with ProXist–it should be a question of writing a ProX blueprint XML file, theoretically, plus something that helps me list DocBook resources included using XInclude.
At the same time, I’m finally updating the ProXist documentation. It’s written using DocBook, incidentally, and now part of the git repository.
ProXist is not even close to being finished, but at least I seem to have moved on from procrastinating to actually doing something.