Lake District post

Also add the associated album and tags

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+[[!meta title="A week in the Lake District"]]
+
+I recently spent a week in the [[!taglink lake_district]]. This was a nice
+change of pace after finishing exams.
+
+[[!img albums/lake_district_2014/IMG_20140621_192826.jpg size="300x" align="left" ]]
+
+In contrast to Milton Keynes, or Southampton, there was quite a large amount of
+wildlife to be found immediately outside the window. I saw a great number of
+birds, who came to the feeders, and the seed that the birds dropped attracted
+two ducks, some mice (or similar small mammals) and some rabbits (including
+some very young rabbits).
+
+[[!img albums/lake_district_2014/IMG_20140626_082007.jpg size="300x"
+    align="right" ]]
+Also using the feeders were a couple of squirrels, one grey squirrel and a
+rarer red squirrel, both who happened to try and get some peanuts at the same
+time (causing some contention).
+
+While not doing any of the above. I worked on [[!taglink ikiwiki]], mostly
+because it was the easiest thing to work on, without an internet connection.
+
+I would like to put photos up on this website, using [[!taglink git_annex]]. To
+do this, there were two obstacles to overcome.
+
+Firstly was the [[!taglink album|ikiwiki/album]] plugin for ikiwiki, the
+absolute positioning of the controls meant that it did not work to well with
+the layout of this site. It was also a bit awkward to use as the templates, css
+and code are not included within ikiwiki.
+
+To address this, I started using the album4 branch from Simon McVittie, rebased
+this on to the current master branch, and attempted to improve the css. I
+believe it now works a bit better, as there is no absolute positioning.
+
+You can see these changes in the album branch, and I also created a [[simple
+example|projects/ikiwiki/album]] site to demonstrate the plugin.
+
+The second hurdle was getting ikiwiki working with git annex. The main issue
+with this is how ikiwiki and git annex handle symlinks. Ikiwiki, for security
+issues ignores symlinks. While git annex, when operating normally (not in
+direct mode), uses symlinks as those are what is commited to git.
+
+There have been some attempts to do this previously, some using git annex in
+direct mode, and some using underlays to get the content across. I opted for a
+different approch, that is modify ikiwiki to follow symlinks (or rather, make
+it configurable). While this has some security implications, for the use on
+this site, this works well.
+
+The [[album|albums/lake_district_2014]] for this week is now up, and is the reason why
+this post has taken so long to publish, as I kept encountering issues with
+Ikiwiki in getting the album up.