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posts about musikwiese.

over the last weeks, i’ve been starting to convert my blogs to nikola, a static blog generator named after nikola tesla. so far, i’ve finished my math blog and musikwiese. i also got rid of the fixed width layout. spielwiese itself will take a bit more work, mostly because of the wordpress plugins i wrote and heavily rely on throughout this blog.

to convert my blogs, i had to add some changes to nikola. most of the core changes are now contained in nikola itself or are close to be integrated (except xhtml support). i also worked a lot on improving its wordpess import, which so far wasn’t very helpful from my point of view. for that, i created a wordpress page compiler for nikola which essentially does the same to posts as wordpress’ formatter does. that part is still not completely done, and since it is a pure plugin, i haven’t released it yet. (that will happen later, hopefully still this year.)

the main disadvantage of the whole conversion process is currently that there’s no more possibility to add comments. all comments written so far are preserved, but currently there’s no support for adding new ones. i’ll try to figure out a good way to do that later. the “standard way” to do that, i.e. using something like disqus, is not acceptable for me, and even though there are free alternatives for self-hosting, i don’t like to rely on javascript for such things. for the moment, you have to send me an email if you want to add a comment to musikwiese or my math blog.

as you might have noticed, all videos embedded from youtube or vimeo got replaced by a disclaimer, stating that i do not want to bear the legal risks of including them anymore. including something you didn’t create yourself is kind of russian roulette. if someone decides to send you a abmahnung, trouble begins. and usually, money goes. lots of money. even if what you do is legal, you’ll have to invest quite some money to make your point. i don’t really want to do this for these videos, so i changed my plugin to let it spit out disclaimers with links instead of embedding* the video. i’m sorry for this, in particular this essentially ruins musikwiese.

*the videos weren’t embedded directly for some time anyway, see here, but i guess that wouldn’t really make difference…

when mary asked for more at the end of the music video series, i spent some time thinking about how to continue this. eventually, i got an idea: create another blog, the musikwiese. (isn’t it a perfect name for this?)

the aim of the musikwiese is to present another artist every few days. the beginnings were made with lacuna coil and capricorns, and my todo list features 89 more bands. this will be a rather long term project, and the todo list will probably not only shrink during that time.

this project is also not necessarily a one man project for all its lifetime. if someone is interested in contributing something, please contact me.

anyway, i hope you enjoy the musikwiese! :-)