Background

So apparently there's this pandemic thing, which means I'm teaching "Alternate Delivery" courses now. These are just like online courses, except possibly more synchronous, definitely less polished, and the tuition money doesn't go to the College of Extended Learning. I figure I'll need to manage share videos, and our learning management system, in the immortal words of Marie Kondo, does not bring me joy. This has caused me to revisit the problem of sharing large files in an ikiwiki based site (like the one you are reading).

My goto solution for large file management is git-annex. The last time I looked at this (a decade ago or so?), I was blocked by git-annex using symlinks and ikiwiki ignoring them for security related reasons. Since then two things changed which made things relatively easy.

1. I started using the rsync_command ikiwiki option to deploy my site.

2. git-annex went through several design iterations for allowing non-symlink access to large files.

TL;DR

In my ikiwiki config

    # attempt to hardlink source files? (optimisation for large files)
    hardlink => 1,

In my ikiwiki git repo

$ git annex init
$ git annex add foo.jpg
$ git commit -m'add big photo'
$ git annex adjust --unlock                 # look ikiwiki, no symlinks
$ ikiwiki --setup ~/.config/ikiwiki/client  # rebuild my local copy, for review
$ ikiwiki --setup /home/bremner/.config/ikiwiki/rsync.setup --refresh  # deploy

You can see the result at photo

In a recent blog post, Kai complained about various existing tools for marking up email in HTML. He also asked for pointers to other tools. Since he didn't specify good tools :-), I took the opportunity to promote my work in progress plugin for ikiwiki to do that very thing.

When asked about demo sites, I realized that my blog doesn't actually use threaded comments, yet, so made a poor demo.

Follow the link and you will find one of the mailboxes from the distribution, mostly a few posts from one of the debian lists.

The basic idea is to use the Email::Thread perl module to get a forest of thread trees, and then walk those generating output.

I think it would be fairly easy to make a some kind of mutt-like index using the essentially same tree walking code. Not that I'm volunteering immediately mind you, I have to replys to comments on my blog working (which is the main place I use this plugin right now).

For a project involving ikiwiki. I am thinking about the right way (or at least a reasonable way) to encode things into email address. At the moment I am leaning towards a hybrid quoted printable/base64 style approach.

You can have a look at my current implementation of a module Convert::YText to do this conversion.

Because life is too short for real work, I decided to convert my blog to ikiwiki. I converted my old blorg blog using a quick and dirty perl script: org2iki.pl.