First of all, Happy New Year to everyone! I haven't been maintaining my site for quite a while since I started a new job a couple of months ago which kept me occupied for most of my time.

First thing for the new year was an upgrade to the latest version of Habari which has been released in December. As always, it went nice and smoothly. One of my next actions will be a major cleanup of the site content. But only if I find the time to do it ;-)

I just upgraded this site to the latest Habari version. Yet again, it went quite smoothly and has shown no issues thus far. Nevertheless, please let me know if you experience any issues while surfing theblackzone.net.

For the first time in weeks I’ve found some time to take care of my blog again. The first thing I wanted to do is to upgrade to the latest version of Habari since there has been quite some development going on since my last update. After having upgraded without any problems the last couple of times, I thought that it wouldn’t be a great deal either. But this time I was entirely wrong.

While the upgrade process itself was as smooth as always the trouble began after reactivating my plugins and my theme. Two plugins and a whole bunch of theme functions have been severely broken due to the recent changes to the tag system the developers made. After having investigated the troublesome parts of the code, I was looking for solutions in Habari’s online resources and the wiki. Much to my dismay, I found that major parts of these resources are outdated and so I ended up reading a lot of the source code to find the right solution.

After a couple of hour’s work, everything seems to be fine again. But, please, if you encounter errors or non-working parts on this site, let me know.

So much for today’s Habari upgrade…

I just came across Vimpress, a plugin for Vim that allows to create and edit blogposts directly from Vim. Looks like the right Thing for me :-)

Although it is originally intended to be used with WordPress, it utilizes the MetaWeblog interface, thus it can be used with other blogs too - in my case Habari.

So, as a first test, this post is written in Vim and directly posted by the plugin. Let's see if it works...

Edit: Works quite well. There seems to be a minor bug when posting new entries (entry id is not returned correctly, respectively an error occurs when this should happen - I'll have a look at this later), but the overall functionality works. Oh, and of course this plugin is only suitable to handle text-only posts. There's no upload functionality for media files - obviously, since we are utilizing a text editor ;-)

Today is Corpus Christi, a religious feast, so we didn’t work here in South Germany. But since the weather was pretty bad (cold and rainy), I spent my day at the computer, upgrading my Cygwin environment and reworking content of my personal wiki knowledge base (which is badly in need to be uncluttered).

I’ve also upgraded my site to the latest version of Habari today. As last time, everything went very smoothly. As far as I have seen, there were mostly bugs fixed and not so much new features implemented. But I might be wrong here, since I haven’t followed the development during the past three months. I’ll have deeper look at it later.

I’ve been very busy during the last few months, as you might have noticed from the lack of posts here. Earlier this year a colleague left our company and I was the only one who was qualified to take over his responsibilities. So I ended up doing his job in addition to mine, doubling my workload. Additionally I was attending an advanced training course, reducing my spare time even further.

Finally, in May, a new colleague took over and I was able to return to my normal job schedule. Shortly after that I also successfully finished my training. Phew! That was a hard time!