This is just a short maintenance info. A few minutes ago I finished upgrading my blog (which is proudly powered by Zine) to the most recent available version (hg calls it tip). Since I was running quite an outdated version (some pre 0.1 alpha version) I had to convert a few things manually. From now on there will be proper support for upgrading all my Zine instances in one go painlessly. If you notice any remaining glitches that need to be ironed out, please add a comment to this posting.

I fixed some problem in Zine that was causing the Atom feed not to validate properly. I want to apologize in advance for any postings that might appear in your feedreader again. This won’t happen anymore but was inevitable.

(I usually don’t like maintenance postings on planets, but I want to check whether my feed still works. I will remove this posting from the planet after it has properly shown up.)

Happy new year!

It’s been a while since I last posted on my blog. The “downtime” had several reasons:

• I participated in Googles Summer of Code this year and was quite busy due to that (blog post for that is on its way).
• I didn’t want to use Wordpress any longer.

I never planned to quit blogging completely because there’s always stuff coming to my mind that I want to make accessible to a wider audience. So now I sat down and worked on a new blog using Zine. Zine (formerly known as TextPress) is a python-powered blogging application similar to Wordpress. It is quite easy to write plugins and themes for it and since I use to program in Python I chose this awesome (but not yet released) piece of software. I didn’t migrate my old postings over from wordpress (although there’s a converter) because I want to change my style of writing a bit (e.g. no smileys anymore). Any link out there pointing at my old blog will be redirected to this very post. If you want some old posting, just contact me by either mail or comment. I keep the database alive.

As of that, I also changed my hackergotchi since the old version somewhat resembled a criminal. (Just in case you were wondering who I am.) I have to thank my fellow student and friend Alvaro for spending several hours with me, testing his new camera and producing the photos.

The new blog is dressed in a theme that I wrote, supported by my buddy Arne. Thanks so much for providing the graphics and coming up with the basic layout idea! (I cannot count the many days of work he put into that. I owe you a beer.)

Expect postings from me at a much higher rate now. I’ll try not to flood planet ubuntu too much, though. (Due to excessive testing there should be no remaining bugs, but one can never know for sure. If you notice anything, please drop a comment to this post.)