For the last year, Mike The Coder has been hosted on Chyrp, a nice and
nimble little self-hosted blogging platform that dips into the tumblelog
side of things (different post types, auto-posting of other websites stuff,
etc.). Then, much to my dismay, Alex announced that he was done maintaining
Chyrp (I’d link to the blog post but the site seems to be down). That alone
doesn’t warrant a switch, since things were working fine as they were, but
it made the antsy side of me kick in.
So now I’m on Tumblr, just because it’s the closest thing to Chyrp and I’m
ready to try something hosted for once. The benefits of Tumblr over
something like Chyrp are many:
- Can email or IM in posts
- Can call in audio posts using a phone
- Easy Disqus integration
- Lots of readily available themes
- All the other stuff that comes with using a popular platform
So holler if you spot any problems. I manually ported over all the posts
worth porting (skipped the twitter statuses and pointless pics, etc.).
I just released a Chyrp module which implements MarkItUp’s Markdown set into Chyrp’s admin UI. It’s a really simple module and should work with Chyrp’s 2.0 release as well as the development releases at GitHub.
I’ve been using it for a couple weeks and have really enjoyed it. MarkItUp does a good job of finding a middle ground between raw code and WYSIWYG. If you’re not familiar with the editor, check out the demos.
Part of the beauty of MarkItUp is that the textarea can stay a textarea since it’s still just text. Most WYSIWYGs have to convert it to an iFrame to display bold text, italic text, images, etc., and that tends to get a bit messy and slow.
Anyways, if you’re a Chyrp user and you’re interested, check out the module. Also, here’s a screenshot:
So you’re balling the Aggregator module but then you realize that even though you have three different types of aggregates which output Link feathers, they all come out looking exactly alike.
The obvious solution is to give each post’s containing div a class with the name of the aggregate that produced it. So that’s what we’ll do.
Open up content/post.twig from inside your theme’s folder, and look for the line that starts with:
<div class="post $post.feather ........... "
That’s where we add our class by putting the following inside the class=”” property:
{%if post.aggregate %} ${ post.aggregate | lower }{% endif %}
That leaves that line looking like:
As you can see, it just transform’s the aggregate’s name into lowercase and outputs it as a class.
The only gotcha here is that it doesn’t do any cleaning, so if your aggregate’s name has anything besides letters and numbers, your code won’t validate.
BONUS TIP: If your aggregate’s name is more than one word, it outputs each word individually as its own class. So if you have a “Delicious Bookmarks” aggregate and a “Blahblah Bookmarks” aggregate, both post types will get “bookmarks” as a class, along with getting “delicious” and “blahblah” respectively. That way, you can have them share CSS styles by targeting that bookmarks selector.
Make sense? No? Oh, sorry.
Approximately 83% of Chyrp’s hotness comes from the fact that it can easily (eh) pull in content from RSS/Atom feeds and output them as posts. In fact, that’s what I do here at MTC to get Tweets, Delicious bookmarks, and Flickr images displayed as posts automatically.
The catch is that, as a result of Chyrp’s ripe young age, there’s very little documentation, so it can be a little bit of a hassle trying to get it working. I thought I’d post my settings here for anybody that’s trying to get one of those three really common feed types working. Here’s the relevant bit of /includes/config.yaml.php. Basically, just copy the “data” field into the data textarea of that aggregate type, and the rest should be self explanatory.
Hope that helps! Comment if you’re still confused.
