today, i've added two new plugins to nikola: sidebar and static tag cloud. these, together with filetreesubs, a doit-based file tree synchronization and text-based substitution tool, allow to use nikola to create a more dynamic-looking blog with a sidebar having current information, without the need to rebuild every single page every time something changes. (which can take a very long time for a large blog such as spielwiese).

the plugins create html fragments and, for the tag clouds, css files, which have to be included in all generated blog pages. one way to do this is to use javascript, but that wouldn't yield a proper static blog as i imagine it. the sidebar and the tag cloud should always be there, and not depend on javascript being enabled. (i for myself use noscript and javascript in my browser is off by default.)

for spielwiese, a small tag cloud is created (one per language) and included in the sidebar. a large tag cloud is created and included in the tag overview page (chde version). also, a small and large place cloud is created and included in the sidebar and place overview page, respectively.

the configuration for the static tag cloud plugin looks as follows:

RENDER_STATIC_TAG_CLOUDS = {
    # Small tag cloud
    'small': {
        'name': 'tcs-{0}',
        'filename': 'tagcloud-{0}.inc',
        'taxonomy_type': 'tag',
        'style_filename': 'assets/css/tagcloud-{0}-small.css',
        'max_number_of_levels': 15,
        'max_tags': 40,
        'minimal_number_of_appearances': 5,
        'colors': ((0.4,0.4,0.4), (1.0,1.0,1.0)),
        'background_colors': ((0.133, 0.133, 0.133), ),
        'border_colors': ((0.2, 0.2, 0.2), ),
        'font_sizes': (6, 20),
        'round_factor': 0.6,
    },
    # Large tag cloud
    'large': {
        'name': 'tcl-{0}',
        'filename': 'tagcloud-{0}-large.inc',
        'taxonomy_type': 'tag',
        'style_filename': 'assets/css/tagcloud-{0}-large.css',
        'max_number_of_levels': 100,
        'minimal_number_of_appearances': 3,
        'colors': ((0.25,0.25,0.25), (1.0,1.0,1.0)),
        'background_colors': ((0.133, 0.133, 0.133), ),
        'border_colors': ((0.2, 0.2, 0.2), ),
        'font_sizes': (8, 35),
        'round_factor': 0.3,
    },
    # Small place cloud
    'places-small': {
        'name': 'pcs-{0}',
        'filename': 'placecloud-{0}.inc',
        'taxonomy_type': 'place',
        'style_filename': 'assets/css/placecloud-{0}-small.css',
        'max_number_of_levels': 15,
        'max_tags': 40,
        'minimal_number_of_appearances': 3,
        'colors': ((0.4,0.4,0.4), (1.0,1.0,1.0)),
        'background_colors': ((0.133, 0.133, 0.133), ),
        'border_colors': ((0.2, 0.2, 0.2), ),
        'font_sizes': (6, 20),
        'round_factor': 0.6,
    },
    # Large place cloud
    'places-large': {
        'name': 'pcl-{0}',
        'filename': 'placecloud-{0}-large.inc',
        'taxonomy_type': 'place',
        'style_filename': 'assets/css/placecloud-{0}-large.css',
        'max_number_of_levels': 100,
        'minimal_number_of_appearances': 2,
        'colors': ((0.25,0.25,0.25), (1.0,1.0,1.0)),
        'background_colors': ((0.133, 0.133, 0.133), ),
        'border_colors': ((0.2, 0.2, 0.2), ),
        'font_sizes': (8, 35),
        'round_factor': 0.3,
    },
}

the generated css file for the large tag cloud can be found here; the generated html fragments aren't uploaded as filetreesubs doesn't copy them to the output folder.

the configuration for filetreesubs looks as follows:

source: output-spielwiese
destination: final-spielwiese

# Substitutions
substitutes:
  # For all HTML pages: include sidebar
  '.*\.html':
    '<!-- include:sidebar-en -->':
      file: sidebar-en.inc
    '<!-- include:sidebar-chde -->':
      file: sidebar-chde.inc
  # For specific pages, also include tag/place clouds
  'tag/index.html':
    '<!-- include:tagcloud:en:large -->':
      file: tagcloud-en-large.inc
  'place/index.html':
    '<!-- include:placecloud:en:large -->':
      file: placecloud-en-large.inc
  'chde/schlagwort/index.html':
    '<!-- include:tagcloud:chde:large -->':
      file: tagcloud-chde-large.inc
  'chde/ort/index.html':
    '<!-- include:placecloud:chde:large -->':
      file: placecloud-chde-large.inc

# The substitution chains allow the sidebar to include
# the small tag and place clouds.
substitute_chains:
- template: sidebar-en.inc
  substitutes:
    '<!-- include:tagcloud:en -->':
      file: tagcloud-en.inc
    '<!-- include:placecloud:en -->':
      file: placecloud-en.inc
- template: sidebar-chde.inc
  substitutes:
    '<!-- include:tagcloud:chde -->':
      file: tagcloud-chde.inc
    '<!-- include:placecloud:chde -->':
      file: placecloud-chde.inc

# Create index.html files in all folders which don't have one yet.
create_index_filename: index.html
create_index_content: |
  <!DOCTYPE html>
  <html lang="en">
    <head>
      <title>there's nothing to see here.</title>
      <meta name="robots" content="noindex">
      <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=..">
    </head>
    <body style="background-color:black; color:white;">
      <div style="position:absolute; top:0; left:0; right:0; bottom:0;">
        <div style="width:100%; height:100%; display:table;">
          <div style="display:table-cell; text-align:center; vertical-align:middle;">
            there's nothing to see here. go <a href=".." style="color:#AAA;">here</a> instead.
          </div>
        </div>
      </div>
    </body>
  </html>

# Everything is UTF-8.
encoding: utf-8

# I want to be able to run different things in parallel.
doit_config:
  dep_file: '.doit-spielwiese-subs.db'

this allows me to use html-style comments such as <!-- include:tagcloud:en --> to indicate where the html fragments should be included. i also create index files in foldes which otherwise would be empty, such as /photos/ (see here for how it looks). the result is, from my point of view, a much more polished version of the blog than the raw version produced by nikola without postprocessing.

this should give you an idea on how to produce a similar result with nikola, my plugins and filetreesubs.

it’s more than eight years ago that i started spielwiese.

so far, spielwiese was mostly a black and white, lowercase english experience. until now. using nikola‘s multilingual capabilities, i decided to try translating parts of spielwiese to züritüütsch, a swiss german dialect spoken in the canton of zürich, in which i’ve now spent more than eight years of my life.

since züritüütsch isn’t my native language and i’m still far from understanding and speaking it perfectly (though understanding is much better than speaking), i’ll surely make mistakes, though i hope most will be caught by my wife before setting them live :)

this is yet another experiment, and i’ll hope some of you will like it.

after already revamping math and musikwiese earlier this month, it’s time to do spielwiese as well. and here we go! spielwiese now adjusts to all window widths, including mobile phones. and the gallery looks good again, too. (i had to screw with it when adjusting spielwiese for mobile phones the first time.)

the only things missing are a proper popup gallery for mobile phones, and as in the other blogs: comments. so sorry, there’s no way to add a comment at the moment, except by writing me an email.

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.