Tag Archives: html

Building my website with blatter

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I recently came across a project called “blatter”. It’s a Python script that uses jinja2’s template engine to build static websites. This is exactly the sort of thing I’d been looking for. I don’t do anything too fancy with FunnelFiasco.com, but every once in a while I want to make a change across all (or at least most) pages. For example, I recently updated the default content license from CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 United States to CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 International. It’s a relatively minor change, but changing it everywhere is a real pain.

Sure, I could switch to a real CMS (heck, I already have WordPress installed!) or re-do the site in PHP, but that sounded too much like effort. I like my static pages that are artisinally hand-crafted slapped together in vi, but I also like being able to make lazy changes. And I really like page-to-page consistency. With blatter, I can create a few small templates and suddenly changes can be made across the whole site in just a few seconds.

Blatter smoothly merges static and templated content. The only downside is that because it seems to touch all files every time it builds (blats), pushing the new content to my website becomes a larger task. That’s not a huge concern because of the relatively small size of the content, but it’s something that seems fixable. So pretty much all of the site has been blatterized now. For the most part, you shouldn’t really notice any changes.

Status of the Internet

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I’ve been meaning to do this since the Comcast DNS issues a few weeks ago, but I’ve finally put together a quick page with links to the status pages of various web services and sites.  You can check the status of the Internet at http://funnelfiasco.com/internet.html.  It’s a bit surprising how many sites don’t have obvious status pages.  It makes sense for popular sites to have a separate server for status information that users can find when they’re having problems.  I don’t have one for FunnelFiasco because this isn’t a popular site.  If I ever get popular, wake me up from my faint and I’ll stand a status page up.  If any of my dear readers know of sites that have status pages, send me a link or leave a comment and I’ll get it added.

I also had the chance to improve my CSS for FunnelFiasco while writing this.  Over the summer, I was able to find out how to get rid of tables for pictures.  Today, I mostly copied that implementation for “text tables”, or content where I use a table-like format for displaying the data, but don’t need the rigidity.  There are still a few things to work out, but I’m pretty happy with it so far.  Now to backport those changes into other pages.

Building dial information for the radar page

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I thought building the dial (adjacent radar sites) data for my mobile radar site would be a tedious and entirely painful process.  As it turns out, it really wasn’t that difficult.  I knew the data was out there in some form, if you visit any of the radar sites on the NWS website, you get a nice dial in the upper-left part of the screen, but I couldn’t find a good text file with that information.  Just when I was about to stat copying it by hand, I thought “maybe this is parseable”.

It turns out that the page is parseable, but it gets ugly at times.  To get a list of all the sites, I grabbed a file from Unisys.  I could extract the site, city, and state from there, so then all I needed was to grab the 8 (or fewer surrounding sites) and dump them all into a Perl hash.  So I wrote a bit of code to do just that.  It’s ugly, but it’s an example of what you can do when you really, really don’t want to do something by hand: Continue reading →

Lightning photos added

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On Monday evening, Angie and I went chasing unexpectedly.  While the storm produced some wind damage, I’ve been unable to find confirmation of a tornado (there was at least one real-time report, though).  We saw very little of interest, until the incredible light show afterward.  So I present to you a few boring cloud pictures, plus also the lightning:

http://weather.funnelfiasco.com/chase/21jun10

This is also kind of exciting because for the first time I’ve forgone the use of tables to layout the photos.  The result is that the page renders based on what your screen wants it to, not on what I demand it does.  This is supposedly a much less evil way to do things.  In the future, I’ll be converting some of the older pages to work this way as well.

Further, I’ve updated some of the pages to reflect new license information.  Instead of my custom written “you must have my permission” text, I’m now licensing content under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.  It’s simpler, more enforceable, and more in line with my own personal values.  There’s a blog post forthcoming where I muse upon licensing issues.  In the meantime, know that the content on FunnelFiasco.com is under whatever license it says it is. I’ll work on updating the license text on pages soon.  And maybe I should consider a more dynamic site (e.g. using PHP) so that I don’t have to keep making these changes on each. freaking. individual. page.