A new gad­get: Mootools based menus.

It takes the same da­ta for­mat I used for the Ya­hoo UI menubar, and cre­ates a dy­nam­ic, slid­ing, an­i­mat­ed, pret­ty, work­s-on-­l­ynx menu.

No screen­shot be­cause it makes no sense with­out the move­men­t. You can see it at the top of the side­bar (click on the dark­er item­s, out­side the links... that needs work).

And yes, that means this blog has, right now, two menus with ex­act­ly the same da­ta in them. And on a non-JS brows­er both are ful­ly ex­pand­ed.

But that's just tem­po­rary ;-)

The nerdi­est fea­ture of all time... sim­ple SVN logs.

Here's the RST code:

.. svnlog:: https://ra-blog.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/
  :limit: 3

And here is what it does:

You can see the en­tries are nice­ly for­mat­ted. That's be­cause this re­struc­tured text di­rec­tive con­nects to your SVN server, re­trieves the changel­og, pars­es it, tries to process the in­di­vid­u­al en­tries as re­struc­tured tex­t, and then for­mats and spits it out again.

I de­cid­ed to add the re­cur­sive pars­ing be­cause I tend to for­mat ev­ery­thing I write as valid re­struc­tured text any­way. But that means I can in­clude im­ages, ta­bles, files, and even oth­er logs in my en­tries.

How is it use­ful? Well, I in­tend to have my pro­ject­s' pages writ­ten us­ing this. This way I don't need to keep a changel­og.

Al­so, I bet the ti­tle is right ;-)

It was pret­ty hard, but I fi­nal­ly man­aged to make bartle­blog re-ren­der on­ly the nec­es­sary pages.

In fac­t, now my blog has a few less pages be­cause some ran­dom stuff was gen­er­at­ed in the past, and nev­er got delet­ed.

There are still some bugs but, with this, it's a rea­son­ably use­ful ap­p.

Todo:

• Al­ter­­na­­tive com­­ment sys­tem based on JS-K­it

• Flickr pho­­to­set di­rec­­tive

• Nicer Openo­my tag di­rec­­tive

• Flickr and Openo­my up­­load­­ing

• Many con­­fig pages and wiz­­ards

• Back­­­ground ren­der­ing

• Lots of UI love

• Feed­Burn­er sup­­port to au­­to­­mat­i­­cal­­ly use their ver­­sion of the RSS feeds

Oth­er than that, it's pret­ty much fea­ture-­com­plete, or at least it has enough fea­tures a nerd can use it to post a blog just like this one, for what­ev­er that's worth.

I had a few min­utes wait­ing for yum to do its thing and added a cou­ple of easy fea­tures:

The Sil­verCi­ty-based code-block syn­tax high­light­ing di­rec­tive was re­placed with a ver­sion us­ing Pyg­ment which sup­ports more lan­guages and is (I think) nicer look­ing... and comes with sev­er­al styles, as you can see above in the con­fig­u­ra­tion di­a­log.

Oth­er than that, I added sup­port in the back­end to:

• Re­­gen­er­ate HTML from RST ev­ery­where

• Do the same on­­ly on items marked "dirty"

• A mod­­el thingie that shows if there are posts or sto­ries with RST er­rors

• Some GUI love

I need to make the con­fig di­a­log sup­port more than one gad­get at the same time, though ;-)

• I did the tag ed­i­­tor:

The "Guess Tags" but­ton in the com­pos­er us­es the "Mag­ic word­s" de­fined for each tag to give you a start­ing set, which you can ed­it lat­er. Still has a few im­ple­men­ta­tion is­sues (thus the tagless­ness of this post) but it's al­most there.

• Us­ing HTMLTidy I made all the HTML val­i­­date (as tran­si­­tion­al, at least­­).

• Us­ing browser­­cam I made sure this page works on ev­ery de­­cent brows­er (it looks bad on IE 4.0, and Net­s­cape 6):

There is a nasty prob­lem with IE and JavaScrip­t, where if you have a <scrip­t> that does some spe­cif­ic things in­side of a <di­v> it tends to give a weird "Op­er­a­tion abort­ed" di­a­log af­ter show­ing part of the page, and then delete what you were se­ing. That is a known, con­firmed bug, and has been there for three ma­jor ver­sions al­ready.

• Added a feed­Box wid­get that can dis­­­play as a side­bar any feed that us­es Feed­Burn­er's Buz­z­­Boost (see "Lat­est com­­ments" on the side­bar).

I am now toy­ing with us­ing Feed­Burn­er's API to (op­tion­al­ly) au­to­mat­i­cal­ly pub­lish all the RSS feeds Bartle­Blog gen­er­ates there, thus mak­ing this kind of thing more trans­par­en­t.