Niels’ Homepage

To update a site created by NanoBlogger you either have to:

• Painfully copy the newly created entries by hand and move or remove all other files.
• Use a protocol like rsync. But some of us are not fortunate enough to have a hosting company that offers this protocol (as a side note: that is about the only shortcoming I can think of regarding BHosted).
• Brew your own update script that works quite well, but is still a little rough around the edges. In order the smooth things out you would have to spend considerable time which you don’t have.

Or you can read the NanoBlogger newsgroup where a question on site-synchronization was answered by me and then by someone else who had a better answer.

So suffice to say that I will be no longer using my home-brew sl, instead I will be using sitecopy. It works on the same principle as my own solution, only more mature and maintained by somebody else :). The observant reader will notice that sl no longer is in my category list. The entries and the program will stay however. So if needed they can still be found.

Sitecopy is very simple. All it needs are two things:

1. An entry in a file called .sitecopyrc in your $HOME, where an entry has to be created per website. The permissions of the file have to be set to 600. Mine looks like this:

   site heirbaut.nl
       server server9.bhosted.nl
       protocol sftp
       rsh "ssh"
       rcp "sftp"
       username ***
       password ***
       local /home/niels/Projects/www/www.heirbaut.nl/
       remote /srv/nielsh/www/www.heirbaut.nl/
       state checksum
       checkmoved renames
   

2. A working directory called .sitecopy in $HOME with the permissions set to 700.

One of the reasons I keeps this weblog is to have a central storage of my cumulative knowledge. That is, instead of writing all kinds of little tidbits in a notebook, I put them here. This has the benefit that wherever there is have web-access the information can be found and perhaps someone else that is looking for the information is happy to find it here.

OpenOffice Writer was given me a minor problem: it set the page size for all new documents to the Letter format. It is not difficult to change, but quite annoying. After some investigation I found that the best (only?) method was to:

1. Open OpenOffice Writer.
2. Open the Stylist by pressing F11.
3. Go to the list with page styles.
4. Right-click ‘Default‘ and select ‘Modify‘.
5. In the Page-tab choose the format you want (A4 in my case) and click ‘OK‘.
6. Go to ‘File -> Templates -> Save‘ to save the current template. Choose a new name.
7. Go to ‘File -> Templates -> Organize‘ and right-click the save template (probably under ‘My Templates‘) and select ‘Set As Default Template‘.
8. Restart OO Writer and check if the page size is indeed the correct one.