whow… I was out of bussiness for much more time I thought.

Family problems are always existing, but not anymore an excuse . I simply had 5 month spent scanning all my photo collection. I was initially thinking it was a one month work, but it ended to be much longer. It’s not completely finished (I still have to index some images), but now a routine work.

You can see the public par here http://dodin.org/piwigo/index.php.

I used “piwigo”, a gallery software pretty cute and simple, recommended.
jdd

back in business

After some time devoted mostly to my family, I’m back on the LDP business.
I mostly right now focus on the Partition HOWTO I’m rewriting, however this is much more complicated than I expected, so it will take time http://wiki.tldp.org/Partitions-and-mass-storage-HOWTO

personal problems

I had a lot of personal problems recently that dropped down my working strengh. I hope they are gone, now and I will be able to work reasonably again

converting…

The LDP new activity seems to become better known, we have several old authors coming back, this is very pleasant.

So I could convert some HOWTOs to the wiki to ease the proofreading process.

Convert any document to MoinMoin wiki is not that easy. There is only one good script (html2wiki) and it needs html source.

LDP always had problem with html. When one write for the Web, html seems an obvious choice. However html allows virtually anything – and when one do anything it’s mostly bad .

LDP strenght is to ask for structured documentation. A good doc have to include table of content, revision history, carefully designed structure. All this is possible with html, but not for casual writer.

On the contrary, when using linuxdoc or docbook, the parser don’t accept too lazy layout. Also, people able to cope with linuxdoc and even more docbook, are not usually lazzy people .

The wiki have the same drawback, but being openwriting, we can hope experienced users to help new commers.

We yet have to document and develop a more structured help…

busy

I’m not leaving the LDP – simply very busy editing personal videos ATM

dns-howto

Yesterday I could find an old LDP author on linkedin . He was kind enough to accept to update his HOWTO, the DNS-HOWTO on the tldp wiki.

Then I had to test again the convert procedure. This particular HOWTO was quite old (2002) and the source file, sgml/linuxdoc didn’t anymore fit the present toolchain.

The only version (non sgml) available was txt. So I use the tx2html convert script then html2wiki to Moin.

This conversion works pretty well, safe at least two things:

* it’s pretty hard to figure out from a txt file what is code and what is not. The scripts didn’t do this so well, so I had to change some {{{ }}} by hand
* for whatever reason, one of the scripts translated any numeric URL (w.x.y.z) in telnet URL!! so this have to be fixed by hand.

This part of the work is not finished. One have to open the txt version as model, fix some lines, preview the Moin result, compare with the model and go ahead.

The wiki DNS-HOWTO is visible here:

http://wiki.tldp.org/DNS-HOWTO

facing books

facebook is not a book… but the LDP have a group. If you like facebook, please join it, you will certainly be able to find it easily, isn’t it?
Facebook don’t seems too much linux oriented nowaday, but I couldn’t prevent it to make me french (even with chapel hill as an adress), so may be I miss many things

jdd

LDP mirrors

One of the LDP main strengh is the mirrors. You can see them Here. Don’t spend too much time counting them, only take the one nearest from your location .

Of course only The HOWTOs and the similar static documentation are mirrorred. If you want the most up to date and possibly buggy info, you have to go to the wiki (link on the front page).

But you have to know that your work is extremely well displayed to the hole world. If you are a LDP author, of course.

We have frequently new mirrors, get a look at the feedback list where any people wanting to mirror the LDP is writing.

Forgive the eventual spam you can read on this post open list. If you know a way of getting rid of spam on qmail/ezmlm, you are welcome (and have to write a HOWTO )- we have setup as many antispam system as we think of and still get some .

Day’s work

Well, today I openned a new linkedin account and a wordpress blog.

I couln’t achieve my first goal of opening a linkedin accoun on the LDP name, too many profile options are human centrics.

LDP need writers

The LDP need fresh blood, as I said. But this fresh blood is mostly done with technical writers, and Linux addicts.

And LDP don’t simply need html documentation, but documentation in a form easy to spread on the hole world, even in the country where Internet is a dream and computers old gifts (some still uses i386!). So we need a special format. Thius format is Docbook. This is an xml flavor, text between tags not so far from html, but much more flexible. If you go to the tldp web site, you will see than HOWTOs are available on many formats, from simple page html to PDF and than we have a lot of mirrors allowing users to see our doc on nearly any world location.

Writers can write in Docbook, but also use the new tldp wiki as this one is docbook compatible: wiki articles can be translated directly to docbook.