I've mentioned Acrylamid in my last entry. Today, I thought to have a closer look.

But there are so many things I've never heard of. I know of pip and gem. But what are jinja2 and mako? What are sass and compass? What is virtualenv? I know markdown, but what is textile or sphinx?

It's like meeting Pandora Junior, and opening her box unsuspectingly.

Here are the commands you need to temporarily setup the blog of Mark van Lent including all dependencies. What's definitely required is an installation of python and ruby, including their package managers pip and gem.

$ su -
# pip install virtualenvwrapper
# pip install virtualenvwrapper.gem
# exit
$ mkdir envs
$ cd envs
$ source /usr/bin/virtualenvwrapper.sh
$ mkvirtualenv www.vlent.nl
$ git clone &lt;https://github.com/markvl/www.vlent.nl.git&gt;
$ cd www.vlent.nl
$ pip install -r requirements.txt
$ gem install sass --version="3.2.1"
$ gem install compass --version="0.13.alpha.0"
$ vim conf.py           %change your name etc.
$ compass compile
$ acrylamid compile
$ acrylamid view

It's significantly easier without the virtual environment, which, however, enables you to work on setups with very different requirements.

Here're the two latest articles with the layout of Mark:


That's, by the way, an excellent example of the minimalistic style which is currently en vogue. It has advantages: as you see, it looks clean and clear. An even better example is the blog of the acrylamid author himself. He's an Apple user, so the design is dramatically minimalistic and is dramatically lacking the most useful functions.

For example, while I'm not insisting on a tag cloud, it is very useful to have lists sorting entries according to time or tags. And where's a search? Without a search, a blog is just a pile of junk: you never know what's hidden underneath, but you ain't got the time searching anyway.