Lateral Opinion (python)

Nikola Logo Contest!

Roberto Alsina — Tue, 11 Mar 2014 13:14:12 GMT

So you have design skills? Want to make a little money while doing a good thing? Then join the contest! there is a 200 US dollars guaranteed prize, and the contest will be judged by a group of Nikola developers.

Some guidance:

The name Nikola comes from Nikola Tesla, so think concepts connected to that
- The Wardenclyffe tower
- Tesla Coils
- Lightning
- Electricity
- Early 20th century
I hope the logo works well in a variety of formats so, keep it simple. B/W is good.
A drawing without the word Nikola is good, but a good design with the word in it could be good also.

The contest lasts a week, you have 4 days for the qualifying round.

And remember: it has to be better than these

Nikola is now more compatible with Sphinx

Roberto Alsina — Fri, 07 Mar 2014 01:03:37 GMT

Sometimes, you need to use the same text in more than one place. For example, you may want to use fragments of your software manuals in your software's site.

If you are part of the Python-verse then it's likely that your docs are written using Sphinx. Ǹikola and Sphinx share roots in reStructuredText so they are already compatible in many important ways.

However, Sphinx adds a whole bunch of extensions to reStructuredText and Sphinx users use them. So, what's a dev to do? He'll write code. So I wrote a nikola plugin which adds support for a large chunk of the Sphinx-specific markup.

How big a chunk? Quite big since it adds support for over 35 extensions, roles and directives (no, toctree is not one of them yet).

This way, you may be able to enjoy a good documentation-specific tool and a (if I may say so myself) good website tool from common sources.

Enjoy!

Preview of Nikola Webapp

Roberto Alsina — Wed, 05 Mar 2014 13:58:49 GMT

I have already made a few attempts at turning Nikola, a static site and blog generator into a webapp, with varied success. One of the bigger problems was, I think, one of scale. I was thinking of something to replace http://wordpress.com ... something where everyone could host his own blog in very low cost infrastructure.

But then again... why not try to replace all those self-hosted wordpress instances out there? So, here's the webapp plugin!

It's very early stages, no support for pages, only supports markdown, no configuration changes, and you can't even really delete things. But hey, you can post, which is 95% of the usage this will get.

UPDATE: if you are running Nikola from github master, you can install this using the plugins repo: http://plugins.getnikola.com/#webapp and it supports a lot more than on the video above.

Nikola 6.4.0 released!

Roberto Alsina — Sat, 01 Mar 2014 11:03:40 GMT

Happy to announce Nikola version 6.4.0 is out!

More details and everything at the official announcement.

Nikola v6.1.0 is out!

Roberto Alsina — Fri, 04 Oct 2013 18:00:54 GMT

I am happy to announce version 6.1.0 of Nikola, a static blog/site generator is out at the usual place including downloadable plugins, bugfixes, annotations, a new Esperanto translation and more!

Lunchtime Nikola Feature: graphviz

Roberto Alsina — Fri, 27 Sep 2013 14:33:58 GMT

Since we are in the process of adding a plugin repo for Nikola, I wanted to add a simple plugin there so that we can show how it works.

So here it is. You use this:

.. graphviz::

   digraph foo {
       "Idea" -> "tap tap tap" -> "Code";
   }

And you get (assuming graphviz is installed, and this plugin is installed, etc.) this:

Being an Inclusive Project (and how GitHub saved my day)

Roberto Alsina — Wed, 11 Sep 2013 18:41:22 GMT

I have posted over 50 posts here about Nikola and most of them contain something like "Nikola, my static blog/site generator". Well, that's not the case anymore. From now on I will say "a static blog/site generator". Why? Let's see.

For starters, it's no longer true that I wrote it. Although I am still pushing more code that anyone, there are 54 other contributors. That number is astonishing. Why? Because I estimate there are around 200 Nikola users. That means the ratio of contributors to users is incredibly high.

That is probably explained because the way you build a site using Nikola is very programmer oriented. You could describe a static site generator as a sort of "site compiler" and not be far off the mark. Many of the benefits, like you can host your page sources in github! are completely misterious to non-programmers. So, I expected that number to be high, but, having a 25% user=>developer conversion rate? That's bizarre.

So, I suspect I did some things well with this project [1], and wanted to think them out loud, and try to further them.

One thing I think I did well was that it's an inclusive project. If you propose something you are getting heard and I am giving the proposal a fair shake. I may reject it, but not out of hand, but instead after some thought. And if I am unsure, it's accepted. I would rather get something I am not fond of than drive out a contributor [2] because I may change my mind, but a contributor that's gone is not coming back.

Same thing about granting commit rights: want them? You get them with the first successful PR by just asking.

I accidentally deleted the nikola repo. All 693 issues, all 2510 commits, all 25 releases. I could have recovered most of it from my clone and emails, but GitHub revived it, and saved me from my stupidity. And let me be clear: if you show me proof you work at GitHub you get a free beverage of your choice [4] anytime you meet me. You get a hug and a kiss in the cheek. [5] I may name my next son Github Alsina [6] In any case: you guys rock and get my heartfelt endorsement forever (as well as a paid plan even though I don't need it)

Today there was another step on this direction: I am not the sole admin anymore. No longer is https://github.com/ralsina/nikola the canonical repo, it's now https://github.com/getnikola/nikola. The website? Not http://nikola.ralsina.com.ar but http://getnikola.com, paid for 5 years. Added two admins to everything (the awesome damianavila and Kwpolska). Gave up sole control of a loooong list of things [3] and now I can get run over by a bus and things should not bitrot.

It protects those 54 other contributors and few hundred users from my ever losing heart or interest, which is a real risk, and should be alleviated.

I think the most important bit about converting users into contributors though, is that you just need to be friendly. And Nikola is largely a friendly project. And that's made it a lot of fun for the past year or so.

I once read that if you refused to use code written by assholes you could not boot any OS. Well, that may be true, but that doesn't mean being an asshole is OK. This is a small project that does a small thing. But at least I feel confident it's not written by assholes. And that's a victory in itself.

OTOH there are some major defficiencies still. Diversity is good in some areas (geographically, for instance) but AFAIK the percentage of women contributing to the codebase is 0% and I have no idea why, and I would love to improve that.

So, lots of work done, lots more to do. That's a good position to be in, I think.

[1]	Alternative explanation: I did some things so badly I have driven out 99% of the user base.

[2]	Within reason.

[3]	Github's checklists on Issues are great

[4]	Within reason.

[5]

Optional.

[6]	Not really.

Nicoletta: Nikola's little sister

Roberto Alsina — Tue, 10 Sep 2013 12:53:59 GMT

Anoche ví este post de James Harding explicando como hacer un blog estático simple usando Flask.

Me puso a pensar... sería difícil hacer algo parecido con la menor cantidad de dependencias posibles? Y cuánto código sería?

Así que en vez de desayunar y almorzar me tomé un café y me comí un sandwich, y acá está Nicoletta un blog estático minimalista.

Las dependencias son:

Markdown
PyYaml
livereload (opcional, sólo si querés el mismo auoreload cool que tiene Nikola.

¿Y cuanto código fue? Había estimado 25 LOC, le erré por mucho: fueron 40. Podría hacer un poco de trampa para achicarlo, pero ... ¿Para qué?

El código está en github y debería ser entendible. Si no lo es, pregunten acá en los comentarios.

Nikola 6.0.0 released

Roberto Alsina — Sat, 07 Sep 2013 18:35:59 GMT

Finally! This took a while because there was a lot of work done, but release 6.0.0 of Nikola my static site and blog generator is out.

Details, files, etc at github

I have tried, for this release, to do things better, be more careful and document as much as possible, as well as tried to hit most things that were hard to fix in a single backwards incompatible break.

Some of the new features are described in a series of blog posts: 1 2 3 4 5

Also: brand new modern themes site: http://themes.getnikola.com and new domain http://getnikola.com among many other tweaks.

Have fun!

Magic Mystery Forum Revisited

Roberto Alsina — Fri, 06 Sep 2013 13:38:24 GMT

A long time ago I wrote a hackish minimalistic forum software, which used Disqus as a backend. Just to see if it still worked after 2.5 years, I took a look... and it sort of did.

So, since I know much more about websites now than I did back then, I cleaned it up a little and deployed it at http://forum.ralsina.me

Mostly, what I have learned in those 2.5 years is that bootstrap and JQuery are cool, and here is the before/after image so you can see why.

And yes, it's still 32 lines of code. I removed a comment because Disqus works better now and the rest is all template changes, done using http://jetstrap.com