So I just switched this entire blog over to Zine. I'm pretty excited about the move... I've spent a good chunk of time reading through Zine's guts, and I've liked what I've seen so far. The code is clean, the plugin system looks pretty nice, and it was really easy to move my data over.

Prior to this I'd been running my own homerolled blog on here. Nothing fancy, just your bare-bones Django blog. When I originally wrote that thing I had just redesigned Dustycloud.org to be a kind of more permanent home to my projects, and I knew I needed a blog. At that point, I couldn't find anything else that seemed like the kind of thing I wanted and was also written in Python and Django (at that point, I wanted this entire site to be Django-only). Well, time has passed, and I'm running and writing framework-free or not-necessarily-Django WSGI applications, and it turns out there is a blogging system that really truly resembles the kind of system I want, so I've made that switch. Aside from having generally nice looking internals, Zine uses Jinja2 for templating (my favorite templating system!) and permits reStructured Text based posts (which is what most of the posts in my old blog used). Anyway, it only took me a couple of hours to move both my data and templates over. It feels nice to know that if I put effort into making a bugfix or enhancement, that bugfix or enhancement could affect more users than just me.

Anyway, apparently I overlooked one thing in the transition... if your RSS reader shows all my posts as new again, that's why. Also, the proper feed link is no longer /blog/feed/ but rather /blog/feed.atom, so consider updating your links. I've added a redirect, so if you don't it shouldn't be a problem, but it's nice to use the *correct* link.

Edit: Sorry especially for the spamming caused by the switch of permalinks, planets. :(

Up until recently I was using ejabberd for my XMPP server on dustycloud.org. It worked pretty well, was easy enough to set up, etc. Unfortunately it was also a total memory hog, sucking up more than 120MB of the memory on my tiny VPS. Given I was running the smallest Linode server possible (actually, I just upgraded to the second smallest today, which was pretty painless) this was making it rather difficult for me to add new services and sites.

After a very helpful conversation on identi.ca, I decided to make the switch to Prosody. I'm glad to say it was quite painless: after installing the .deb off their site, making a couple lines of changes to their bundled config file, and running their ejabberd2prosody.lua script, things are running smooth. Prosody only takes about 15 megabytes of memory (including what's cached). Nice!

One word of advice: ejabberd2prosody.lua isn't bundled with Prosody's .deb files currently, so you have to run it from source. The "migrated database" that it creates is set up relative to the script's own path it seems, so you'll have to move the database it creates out of the source directory into /var/lib/prosody. After I figured that out, everything was smooth!

Long time in coming, but http://wedding.dustycloud.org is actually up now. Probably the best looking website I've designed (note: by that I mean graphic design, and I don't do the graphic design for any of the PCF projects; that stuff is done by an incredibly talented fellow, Morgan Knutson). Complete with the sketchy mess that I try to pass off as my style.

I've got a few bits to put up left. Will update with more information as I go.