Electric Josh

Monday, March 04, 2002

We're totally rolling. The front page works, the log archive works well enough for government work, and the presentation is marginally modular. Cool. Man, lightweight web scripting is way more fun than sleeping. #

...

Stick with the same tool

Switching tools is a horrible pain, because everything from the old tool needs to be translated to the new tool's format. Argh.

This is the third weblogging method in a little over a month. The raw-HTML-with-Emacs thing didn't work too well. It was like having a printing press that required me to carve new type every time I wanted to write something new, or having a telephone that's actually a computer and it has to boot up before you call anyone (oh, wait, I have one of those). In other words, just getting stuff done transparently wasn't happening. An out-of-the-box Zope installation was kind of crappy usability-wise, too, because editing text in a web browser is a horribly frustrating experience, and because the site looked like Slashdot unless I did an unreasonable amount of hacking.

Zope makes a nice platform, tho, so I wrote a script that does one thing: runs through all the properly-named entries (Zope object-id is a timestamp) in a folder and sticks a date in above the entries for that date. Pretty simple, but that (and a little bit of presentation) is about 80% of what I (and therefore, by obvious extension, anyone else) could want in a weblog manager. Of course, the other 20% is all the stuff that Radio has that this hack doesn't, like RSS syndication and story archiving and a nice desktop interface and stuff. Permalinks are coming, tho, as are nicely formatted dates and several other niceties that I may or may not get around to worrying about.

Now, to get anyone to look at this site I need to start employing a bunch of gimmicks like blogrolling and pointing to Dave and other cheap Google bombs. Or I can just tell friends and family to look at it, and then pretend I have legions of fans. Heh heh.

Or I might just try writing interesting things well. #

...

Finally

So it looks like we're finally getting to the point where we have something usable sitting here in Zope. The posting process goes basically like this:

1. Make a new DTML document containing simple HTML formatting tags---just paragraphs, bolds, lists and other minutia---with the appropriate name based on the time (in yyyymmddhhmmss format). The entries are sorted by this "timestamp". The coolest thing is that since Zope has an FTP server built into it, I can use Emacs to do this. yay!
2. That's it. The entries are listed in reverse chronological order and each new day is labeled.

Assuming it all works, away we go! #