Updated o-blog, switched to o-blog 2.6

This web site is now using o-blog version 2.6.

The transition follows a few days of testing, spaced out over the past three months. This version of o-blog (2.6) is the current development version of o-blog. According to the main developer, Sébastien Gross, the code is stable enough for production.

Previously, the hillenius.com web site ran an earlier incantation of o-blog. That version was without developer support from the day I started using it.

Legacy code

The first year, the legacy situation was not an issue as the code was stable. But with the upgrade of Debian 7 to Debian 8, the underlying tools were bound to create problems. Until now, I evaded these simply by not updating the machine that ran o-blog.

Installing o-blog v 2.6

The beta version of the upcoming o-blog is 2.6. Sébastien has not found the time to make this version the master version. That means that to check out version 2.6 from git, you’ll have to:

git clone https://github.com/renard/o-blog.git
cd o-blog
git checkout o-blog-v2.6

To start using it, tell Emacs where to find the o-blog lisp directory, and load it.

(add-to-list 'load-path "~/path-to/o-blog-2.6/o-blog/lisp")
(require 'o-blog)

The o-blog documentation needs some care. Bits of the documentation is for earlier versions, and you’ll be flipping back and forth to find up-to-date usage instructions.

A few tweaks

• First, here is one tweak to get rid of a message that will otherwise be added to the end of every post (“If you like this article you may want to share it”, followed by icons for social media sites such as LinkedIn, Twitter and Google+). The idea is nice, but I prefer not to have it in the way.

  My tweak is to create an empty template plugin_share.html. Replace the existing content by:

<div class="ob-share">
</div>

• Second, o-blog 2.6 comes with a caching function that impedes making updates to existing pages. The cache is specified in lisp/o-blog-backend.el:

(cache-dir "../_cache")

Uncommenting this line, does not give the desired result. So for now, just remove the _cache dir whenever you update a blog post.