Recently, while wandering around the Internet, I found a neat little project called ditaa. The basic idea is it takes a textual representation of a diagram, and turns it into a real image. My first thought was that this looked real neat for use in this blog.

I write this now not in HTML directly, but in reStructured Text, a somewhat less verbose markup language native to Python. Thankfully, someone had already made a directive for ditaa diagrams to be embedded in reST and get rendered to an image in the final page. With this in hand, I managed to cobble together a plugin for pelican to add that directive to my posts.

There's only one live example at the moment, which is my American Greetings hackathon post. The plugin itself has been added to my fork of pelican-plugins.

It's not all great, though. One thing I would really like is the ability to render the diagram to SVG instead of PNG. SVG is much better for things like simple diagrams, as it is web-native, (all it is is a special kind of XML document), and it's vector-based, making it inherently scalable for different sized displays. As near as I can tell, ditaa appears to use SVG internally, at least to some extent. Ideally, I'd like to try to reimplement it in Python, not necessarily for any benefit, but because the problem sounds interesting.

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Blog Rebuild

Sun 21 April 2013
By Nathaniel Case

In meta.

tags: blog

As you may notice, my blog looks a lot different now. On the recommendation of a few FOSSBoxers, I have moved to Pelican, a Python-based static site generator. The practical upshot of which is that I can now write posts in reStructuredText, keep the posts themsevles in git, and host ...
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American Greetings Hackathon Followup

Thu 24 January 2013
By Nathaniel Case

In FOSS@RIT.

tags: hackfest

Last weekend was the American Greetings Hackathon, and it was one of the most successful yet. We got more than 70 people attending and working on projects, and most of those projects had at least something working by the end of the 24 hours.

I worked with Ross Delinger, with ...
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Recent Projects: Democrat & Chronicle

Wed 22 August 2012
By Nathaniel Case

In FOSS@RIT.

tags: journalism data alchemy

One of the new projects I had this summer was a project proposed by the Democrat & Chronicle. The project involved access to a selection of emails sent to the Greece school district in the wake of the youtube video involving several of their students. The idea was that we would ...
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Introducing: FOSS@RIT Timeline Year in Review

Wed 22 August 2012
By Nathaniel Case

In FOSS@RIT.

tags: data alchemy jQuery

Yesterday, I sat down with Remy and went over the last of the things we need to do to close out the summer. There was a long list of items, split into two sections, each containing the same sort of stuff. FOSS@RIT has done a lot of stuff in ...
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