An­oth­er morn­ing, an­oth­er fea­ture: ar­chive

Now I'm work­ing on the im­age tool, im­port­ing PyD­S's im­ages and up­load­ing to flick­r, etc.

A cou­ple more hours of hack­ing, and the tem­plates are all new, and more func­tion­al then ev­er.

I am mak­ing heavy use of Ya­hoo's UI li­brary, which makes lots of things much sim­pler:

• Lay­out us­ing Ya­hoo Grids

  I spent hours mak­ing the lay­out you see now, and the one with Grids works bet­ter and was done in min­utes. Avoid rein­ven­t­ing the wheel works for we­b­­pages, too.

• Cal­en­­dar us­ing Ya­hoo Cal­en­­dar

  Is­n't it neat? And it work­s, too. Since the link­ing is han­­dled by javascript I may make it so it loads the posts for a month with­­out reload­­ing the page.

• Styling us­ing their re­set.c­ss stylesheet.

  That stylesheet re­­moves all styling from your page. That way, if there's some­thing there, you put it.

  I used that, added a slight­­ly sim­­pli­­fied stylesheet based on Fire­­fox's de­­fault, Re­struc­­tured Tex­t's and Sil­ver­ci­­ty's, and all the cus­­tomiz­ing I need­ed to do to achieve a sim­­ple but func­­tion­al lay­out were 30 lines of CSS, com­­pared to the rather mon­strous py­d­s.c­ss my blog cur­ren­t­­ly us­es.

• Mod­­u­lar thin­­gies.

  I turned all Tech­no­rati/HaloScan/Feed­Burn­er/Talkr thin­­gies in­­­to macros that take as con­­fig­u­ra­­tion your per­­son­al da­­ta (for ex­am­­ple, HaloScan ID) and if nec­es­sary a post.

If the styling was a lit­tle more done and a few bugs were ironed, I may even start up­load­ing the site us­ing bartle­blog in­stead of PyDS soon :-)

Af­ter a few more hours hack­ing, it's got the fol­low­ing work­ing:

• Cher­ry­Tem­­plate tem­­plates that do about the same as the Chee­­tah tem­­plates in PyDS

• Gen­er­ates the whole site and it looks just the same

• Ad­vo­ga­­to im­­port (my blog should go all the way back to 2000 when I switch!)

• PyDS im­­port

The main miss­ing things are:

• Do a de­­cent tem­­plat­ing sys­tem (right now they are em­bed­d­ed in the code)

• Do a de­­cent con­­fig sys­tem (right now, glob­al var­i­ables)

• Do up­­load­­ing (or just trust lft­p)

• Do post/s­­to­ry cre­a­tion

• Port the RSS tem­­plate

• Flickr in­­te­­gra­­tion

• In­­te­­gra­­tion with all those neat lit­­tle gad­get­s: feed­burn­er flares, HaloScan com­­ments which are cur­ren­t­­ly kin­­da graft­ed (on­­ly work for my ac­­count ;-)

• Look in­­­to Ya­hoo UI tool­k­it for things like the cal­en­­dar and menus.

• Add the ex­­tra stuff to Re­struc­­tured Text so it:

  • Fix­es au­­­to­­­mat­i­­­cal­­­ly links to post­s/s­­­to­ries in the blog

  • Pret­­­ty-prints code us­ing Sil­ver­­Ci­­­ty

• Lots of UI stuff

All in al­l, not re­al­ly a huge amount of work, but I am tak­ing it easy.

When KDE4 is out, a ver­sion with a ful­l-fled­get KHTML in it will be a whole lot nicer.

I have been post­ing this blog us­ing PyDS for over 4 years now. Sad­ly, the PyDS au­thor seems to have aban­doned it. Which is sad, be­cause it's nifty soft­ware.

How­ev­er, keep­ing it work­ing is get­ting hard­er ev­ery year, and I don't ex­pect to be able to do it soon.

Al­so, the da­ta is in a Metak­it database, which is the most an­noy­ing DB ev­er (no re­al schema! colum­nar in­stead of record ori­ent­ed! gouge my eyes with a bread­stick­!)

So, since I have all the data, and my blog­ging needs are mod­est, and no tool does ex­act­ly what I wan­t, I de­cid­ed to write my own.

I could make it a web ap­p, maybe us­ing Tur­bo­Gears, but what the heck, I haven't done a de­cent GUI app in ... ok, ar­guably, I nev­er have done a de­cent one, and my PyQt4 needs some work, and I am kin­da in a groove for ac­tu­al­ly fin­ish­ing things late­ly (I am rather proud of RaSPF).

And I have a neat name (Bartle­Blog) re­served from an­oth­er abort­ed ap­p.

So, here's the manda­to­ry screen­shot af­ter a cou­ple hours hack­ing:

And here are the goal­s:

• Gen­er­ate stat­ic pages, so it can be used by any­one with a lit­­tle web space (I am a gip­sy)

• Sim­­ple tem­­plat­ing (Us­ing cher­ry­tem­­plate right now, but should be mod­­u­lar)

• Re­struc­­tured Text as in­­put mech­a­nism (a­­gain, mod­­u­lar)

• Good sup­­port for code snip­pets

• Should sup­­port stat­ic pages (like the ones I have in the Sto­ries link)

• In­­te­­grate with Flickr for im­ages

• In­­te­­grate "chunks" in the tem­­plat­ing, where you can do things like set­t­ing the right Haloscan com­­men­t/­­track­­back links eas­i­­ly

• Sim­­ple cat­e­­go­ry mech­a­nis­m, with a reg­ex­p-based au­­to­­tag­ger with­­out cre­at­ing per-­­cat­e­­go­ry copies of ev­ery­thing.

• RSS feed gen­er­a­­tion, glob­al and per-­­cat­e­­go­ry.

• A way to im­­port all my PyDS blog (and maybe my old­er ad­vo­ga­­to things)

• Use sqlite and SQLOb­­ject for sane stor­age.

So far, it's do­ing some things, I can im­port, ed­it, save (by in­stant ap­pli­ca­tion, there is no "save" here).

I can't yet gen­er­ate the site, or cre­ate a new post, and it should take months to make it use­ful, but let's see how it goes.

Back in oc­to­ber of 1996, when ev­ery­one was sav­ing for the fly­ing car we would buy in 5 years, and KDE was start­ing, slow­ly, to take shape in the minds of a few.... there was a gen­er­ous of­fer­...

Matthias Ettrich (ettr...@ti-ibm03.informatik.uni-tuebingen.de) wrote:*
>         -------------------------------------------
>         New Project: Kool Desktop Environment (KDE)
>         -------------------------------------------
>
>                     Programmers wanted!

Freedom Software would be willing to contribute with
the source code of Freedom Desktop Light for this effort.
Please don't subestimate the task of building a
desktop manager. Several Years have been spent building
Freedom Desktop.  We could also contribute with
other pieces of technology (i.e Freedom Rt - Object oriented
toolkit). For more information about Freedom Desktop,
please visit http://www.fsw.com

Freedom Software is about to announce a free version
of the software for Linux (personal use only). This version
is called Freedom Desktop Light for Linux.

If I were you, I wouldn't restrict the project to a specific
toolkit (at least for now). There are many pieces of public
software that can be reused easily. It could take a long
time to rebuild everything from scratch. Try to reuse
the more you can now. You can standarize on a single
toolkit later.

Also keep in mind that Motif  is the defacto standard.
Most Unix platform ship with Motif. It would be nice
if your desktop work on all the versions of Unix

Edgar Galvis
Freedom Software
http://www.fsw.com/motif.html - Home of Freedom Desktop for Motif
supp...@freedom.lm.com

UP­DATE: I had not both­ered check­ing, but free­dom desk­top's site has been avail­able un­til very re­cent­ly. There is still some­thing in the in­ter­net archive, too.