I found a cou­ple of hours to hack, and de­cid­ed to spend them on Bartle­Blog.

Here's what got done:

• UI for blog pre­f­er­ences (still need to do maybe ten of these lit­­tle mod­­ules).

• Search for files in rea­­son­able places (in­stead of us­ing the DB in the cur­rent fold­er, for ex­am­­ple).

• Start­ed work on a first-use wiz­­ard

• Start­ed work­ing on a orig­i­­nal and sim­­ple help sys­tem (re­­source files, yay! ;-).

• Im­­ple­­men­t­ed (lame­­ly) post­ing of "s­­to­ries" which are stat­ic pages that are not part of the blog's flow.

I in­tend to spend a cou­ple of hours on it ev­ery day for the next ten days or so. Af­ter that, who knows, maybe a re­lease will be rea­son­able.

Now, I don't know if this is use­ful, but I do think it's way neat.

In­spired by S5, rst2s5, and mootools I took an hour (or two) and hacked this neat lit­tle slide tool.

The goals dif­fer from S5 in that I in­tend to write a fron­tend, so that you have a sort of very-poor-­man's pow­er­point, but al­so in that the out­put should be sim­ple to em­bed in oth­er pages so that I can even­tu­al­ly make this a part of bartle­blog.

Check it out (click to go to next slide, move mouse to the top of the slideshow for con­trol­s):

from base64 import *
def myFirstFunction():
      print b64decode ('YnllIHdvcmxkIQ==')

.. flickr:: myPhotoTitle

There may be an ar­ti­fact when you slide out the syn­tax-high­light­ed box­es, but I have no idea how to fix it.

Al­so, I have not test­ed it at all in IE, so if it fails there, don't wor­ry, that's to be ex­pect­ed!

Next time I speak in pub­lic, I may use this :-)

And, as a teas­er... this is the source for the pre­sen­ta­tion you just saw:

Why use BartleBlog
==================

(If you are a nerd)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

:author: Roberto Alsina <ralsina@kde.org>

It's nerd-oriented
------------------

It's trivial to display source code, with
proper syntax highlighting.

.. code-block:: python

  from base64 import *
  def myFirstFunction():
        print b64decode ('YnllIHdvcmxkIQ==')

Even for things like shell sessions.
Dammit, I am a nerd, I will try to add every nerd
feature I deem cool.


It does things simply
---------------------

Wanna show a flickr photo?

.. code-block:: rst

  .. flickr:: myPhotoTitle

How about using openomy.com to share your files?
And whatever else you can think of, it probably
**can** be done.

It's very easy to extend
------------------------

Really. It's simple python code.

* The module to do syntax highlighting has 41 lines.

* The module to do dynamic animated menus has 103.

* The module to do calendars has 72.

If there is a python module or web service to do what you
want, hooking it into BartleBlog is simple.

And it has kickass features
---------------------------

Like online, embedded, animated slideshows! Like this one!
Done with 65 lines of simple almost-plain-text markup!
Ok, it's not fully implemented yet, because it needs some manual
code, but the hard part is done!

Or automatic SVN changelog display ( I admit that's *somewhat niche* ;-))

Now, who else has that kind of thing?

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.