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.

Those of you who have been around here from time to time might be well aware of the lack of updates I've made over the last couple of months. This was not only caused by my chronic lack of time, but also my diffuse focus on topics.

I have always seen this website mainly as my personal playground, not wasting much thought on content or audience. Also, I'm reluctant to re-post so called 'popular stuff' that has been seen elsewhere on the web. All this has resulted in a bunch of infrequent posts I've published here, containing mainly uninteresting stuff.

I still suffer from the chronic lack of time, but I feel I should refocus the purpose of this site. So it's time to rethink, I guess...

Now, I have a very wide variety of interests and my field of attention changes over time. This comes in handy in real life, enabling me to participate in all kind of conversations. Unfortunately it is not suitable for writing articles on a blog, where you have to stay on focus of at most a handful of topics. But where to put the focus on?

Well, I'm not totally clear about this yet, but I have a bunch of ideas. What I'm already sure about is, that I won't narrow down to a single topic. Also, there won't be a redesign of the site (as I did so often in the past) and it will be continued in the form of a blog (though I was thinking about changing it into a wiki lately).

The quintessence is, that there needs to be some kind of change in order to turn this blog back into something useful. Maybe I should just let evolve it...

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 ;-)