This is a major feature enhancement release for WikklyText, adding these features:

• New script twextract converts a TiddlyWiki into a set of XML and HTML files. This is useful for ...
  • Serving your TiddlyWiki content as a lightweight set of pages instead of each user having to download the entire wiki.
  • Serving your TiddlyWiki content in a Javascript-restricted environment. The generated files are plain HTML.
    
    

You can view a demonstration here: TiddlyWiki Home Page, converted to HTML.

Other enhancements/fixes:

• Wikitexts can use <<set $LINKS_NEW_WINDOW 0|1>> to determine if links open in a new window.
• Improved CSS styling & document structure for standalone documents.
• Bugfixes in tables, allowing the PeriodicTable sample to work again.
• Lots of internal fixes and reorganization.
  
  

Downloads & instructions can be found at the WikklyText Home Page.

This is a bugfix release for WikklyText, taking care of a problem where embedded Python code (<?py ... ?>) was not visible from nested macro calls.

Downloads & instructions can be found at the WikklyText Home Page.

Update: WikklyText is now the default input format here for user comments. You can still use Filtered HTML if you choose, but WikklyText is the default.

You might have noticed a tagline showing up on articles written here lately — "Written in WikklyText". WikklyText is the name of the underlying wikitext engine used here at boodebr.org. WikklyText is a markup language that is "99% compatible" with TiddlyWiki markup. It can be used both as a Drupal plugin, and to create standalone (X)HTML documents. It is written in Python and isn't tied to any particular web framework. You should be able to plug it in to any CMS; I implemented a Drupal plugin because that is what I use.

After much work and polishing, I'm announcing the first public release — 0.99.16. As this is the first public release, please read the documentation and exercise caution before installing on your site and giving unlimited access to anonymous users.

Downloads & instructions can be found at the WikklyText Home Page.

Note that using WikklyText as a Drupal plugin requires Drupal 5.x. I'll gladly accept patches to make it work with Drupal 4.x, but I'm not currently running any 4.x servers.

Just a quick note to let everyone know I've turned on the Drupal Spam filter now. It is making life a lot easier, but the filter is still in the learning phase, and is incorrectly marking a few comments as spam. If Drupal tells you your comment is spam, don't worry - I'm still scanning all comments so I'll mark it "not spam" when I see it. (I'd recommend using a non-spam-sounding subject line so I catch it.)

I've completed another revision to All About Python and Unicode. Please check it out and let me know if you think I've made it worse. :-)

Changes in this version:

• Rewrote introduction, to walk through the evolution from ASCII to Unicode
• Simplified section "A Wrinkle in \U". I hope this is clearer now, it seems to have caused some confusion before.
• Added a section "Python as universal recoder"
• Incorporated user comments into the Mac OS/X section.
  
  

Check it out: All About Python and Unicode

Oops, the site has apparently been offline to anonymous users for a bit and I didn't notice. I had turned on caching and it seemed to be working for a while so I didn't bother to check again. Turning caching back off brought the site back alive. Sorry about that ...

I can't take credit for this one, just a satisfied user: Drupal and FeedBurner shows you how to easily hook your Drupal RSS feed into FeedBurner.

Quick summary (see link above for details):

• Create a URL-alias for rss.xml, name it something like feedburner-feed
• When you register your site with FeedBurner, give it the aliased feed, for example I used http://boodebr.org/feedburner-feed
• Redirect existing feed subscribers by adding this to your site's .htaccess:
  # redirect feed requests to feedburner
  # (see http://www.roguewolves.com/drupal-and-feedburner)
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} boodebr.org
  RewriteRule rss.xml http://feeds\.feedburner\.com/boodebr-org [R,L]
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} boodebr.org
  RewriteRule node/feed http://feeds\.feedburner\.com/boodebr-org [R,L] 

I have Drupal configured as described here: Having Drupal live in a subdirectory. I was able to just add the above lines to the end of my existing .htaccess.

All existing subscribers will be transparently sent to feedburner, as will new subscribers. This redirection magic is really nice if you ever stop using feedburner — just remove the lines from .htaccess, and the feed is back on your site.

Updated Mar 13, 2007 to add instructions for Drupal 5.x.

The notify module (Drupal) is supposed to let you know via email when new content and/or new comments are available on your site. This is good from an adminstrators viewpoint since you don't need to periodically scan your logs to see if anything new has been submitted.

However, there is one problem I'm having with it: It won't notify you of unpublished comments. So if an anonymous user posts a comment, and it goes into the approval queue, you will not get an email notification. Coming from Wordpress, I see this as a big problem since Wordpress would notify you of comments that were awaiting approval. The only workaround seems to be to give all users (including anonymous users) the right to publish comments without approval. That was definitely not what I wanted.

Luckily, I was able to make a minimal patch to notify that seems to do the trick.

OK, I had fixed a bug in Drupal's comment notification, but the previous workaround does not work with Drupal 5.x. For some reason, once again, I'm getting emails notifying me of new content, but not new comments. However, I'm still getting a lot of spam that I don't want posted, so I'm keeping the approval queue turned on for now. Sorry if it takes a bit for your comments to be posted, as I'm not getting the emails. Will try to find a fix ...

UPDATE: Fixed for Drupal 5.x, see instructions here.

I've updated the entire Python Tourist series to the new format. Instead of the old static HTML, it is now fully integrated into Drupal, allowing comments to be posted. Old links should continue to work, redirecting you to the new content. Let me know of any problems.