How to follow this blog

Now that Mastodon and the Fediverse are getting a big influx of new users, I thought it would be worthwhile mentioning that you can follow this blog on the Fediverse. Just search for @frederik@blog.frehi.be on your favourite Fediverse server and you should be able to follow this blog.

If you are not a fan of social media, you can subscribe to the RSS feed of this site: https://blog.frehi.be/feed/. You will need an RSS aggregator on your system, such as Thunderbird, NewsFlash (GNOME), Akregator (KDE), Feeder (Android), NetNewsWire (macOS, iOS). There are also web-based solutions available. Web-based feed aggregators which you can install on your own server are TT-RSS, Nextcloud News. Feedly is a popular proprietary web-based solution, but as usual the problem is that this limits your privacy, and makes you depend on a commercial party.

Server migration to Debian

Since this afternoon, this server is now running Debian GNU/Linux Squeeze. Just like the previous system, this is a KVM virtual machine running on a HP Proliant DL185G5 host. The host server has always been running Debian. This was my last production system still running Mandriva. I might have forgotten to move over a few things or there might be some breakage somewhere, so let me know if you encounter a problem.

Server and blog update

Tonight, I updated the server on which this blog is running from Mandriva 2010.0 to Mandriva 2010.1 Cooker. The update went very smooth. The only problem I discovered is that the bacula-fd init script seems pretty broken so I made some bug reports about that.

At the same time, I updated WordPress to the latest version 2.9.2 and installed a new theme, the Arjuna X which looked nice at first sight. All visitors using Internet Explorer will get a banner with a recommendation to update to a better browser thanks to the No IE Welcome plug-in. I hope more people will put up such a banner on their website in order to help spreading the word about better browsers. Especially in light of the current Theora vs. H264 video codec in HTML 5 discussion, I think we really need to promote those browsers that favour a really open codec. Firefox, Chrome and also Opera (from version 10.50, not yet available for Linux) are the good guys supporting Theora.

Enjoy life!

If you have been following this blog for some time, you will have noticed that lately I have been posting a lot less than in the past and that I also reduced my Mandriva packaging activity. There are many reasons for this, which all come down to this: I have the feeling I can spend my time in a more useful and pleasant way than by creating bunches of Mandriva packages every day and being active on the Cooker mailing list, like I used to.

I expect I will not be able to resist to updating a package now and then, but because I am considering switching to another distribution (which would likely be Debian testing), this might also end in the future. In any case, also don’t expect “Cooker noteworthy updates” posts any more on this blog.

Now it is time to enjoy life! :-)

Updated Serendipity

I just updated Serendipity, the software that is behind this web log, to version 1.3. The update went very smooth: I am using Subversion to manage this software, so a simple svn switch to Serendipity’s 1.3 branch and a few clicks to update the configuration file, sufficed to make everything up to date! I should play around a bit to see what improvements this brought me and whether the multi-language stuff finally works correctly (which I doubt, but one never knows…).

New graphical template

I updated this blog to Serendipity 1.2 (svn branch snapshot) and set up a new graphical theme: bulletproof. There is still some tweaking left (reinstallation of some plug-ins, probably just like before I will still need to patch Serendipity a bit to play well with multilingual posts, etc…), but for now, I am very happy with the result.

Now I should try to blog a little bit more than the last few months :-)