Alrighty, the example blog really works again. I should spend some time on making some interesting “themes” now, probably, but I really hate making themes. Web “design” in general really.

See what I said here, really. I’ve never been entirely sure if that page is supposed to be something you should read if your attitude needs adjusting, or if my attitude needs adjusting. Probably both. (“The Pope and I can take it, but don’t pick on Pat Buchanan...”)

What I really ought to do is kill that stupid S2 friends-view layout I have, but, yuck. S2.

0.8 is up. I was going to fix a bunch of the docs and examples, because someone requested it, but then I found an actual bug so it seemed like a good idea to get it out now.

I need to write Last.fm docs too. Procrastinate, procrastinate.

Okay, I think the tag plugin is done.

So I’ve gotten the roux rewrite running, finally. Not doing anything useful, but running. I can’t believe I was using a pull parser and generating the Atom 0.3 by hand(!) before. Ugh. Totally, completely, hideously embarrassing.

Anyway last time I got distracted on the way to making it useful and just said “screw this, I’ll put some regular expression crap in” and it’s been hobbling along on that (basically no better than the million other screen-scrapers out there). But. I had a brainwave about how to implement what I was really looking for (the “civilized” bit), which works on simple cases at this point; I just need to think about making it extendible. Should be fun.

Enabling domain-specific languages seems to be a theme with all this recent stuff. I don’t know why.

You know it’s bad when writing several screenfuls of recursive fuzzy tree matcher in Python is fun and doing a tiny bit of tree and Makefile maintenance on a C project so you can push out fixes from last year is a chore you’ve been putting off for weeks.

One of the few annoying things about free software is simply finding it. You can get a very good idea of what is to your taste or not from people around you, but if you don't know or care (or want to care!) about some particular problem, generally people whose opinions you trust don’t like any of this crack either.

In particular, Web Frameworks(tm). Lots of people love them. I’ll take vanilla. After paging through several manuals last weekend for things which I might be able to use a templater from, and finding that despite all the other features, no one seemed to even care that much about even doing inheritance sanely, I got annoyed and grumbled something about how they all sucked and figured I could just factor that logic out myself and use what I was already using for the boring bit.

However, Erich pointed out that that sucked too. And if you care about being correct (says me who serves all these pages with the XHTML mime type despite it breaking Internet Explorer and Google), you should probably assume that if you give your users (including yourself!) something fragile, they’re inevitably going to break it (and if they’re the sort of users that have been crawling out of the woodwork these days, well...). So I checked out Kid, to which I am giving yet another link here because it’s just that good. I’ve seen attempts to implement the “it’s all valid XHTML” thing before and they were rather blah. This one seems to actually fit with its being hosted on lesscode.org. And I am nothing if not a sucker for less code. And for things being pleasant to read.

So I ported my templates over and added the four lines I alluded to, and now (since I know my output is provably valid), although I have not put them live yet, I have a starting point for making them be a little less crack (really, it’s very bad). Has anyone registered lesscrack.org yet?

OMG! I just remembered I own a copy of the elephant shrew book!

...Somewhere.

I would have had no idea that’s what those were if not for this page. (This is a blog, I have to make a link somewhere. Read the articles; they made me smile at least.)

Erich, I’ve been working on one for this blog. No persistent cache to speak of except for the files themselves when their sources haven’t been touched, and I haven’t found any reason to need XML, but I was trying to avoid much of the same nonsense you mention. As such, the templating is as dumb as possible. Perhaps you can do a lot more with XSLT, but I didn’t find it very interesting. Templating systems in general make me itchy.

I am now, however, thinking about making it easy to subclass that part of things as well, which could be interesting. Write something to talk to the big XML library, one import in layout, a few lines to save the cache in a pickle... hmm!

(I always stick a “raw-html” role into reST if I really need it for something, but generally, I try not to think about HTML period.)

I haven’t heard from anyone about it yet so I don’t know which X, Y, and Z are obviously lacking. :)

I decided to grab a large Maildir from my actual email and run it through Mnemosyne for shits and giggles. For 1184 messages: 1:49 to build from scratch, 0:14 to verify that nothing has been touched. No tags, just archives. (This wouldn't be a half-bad way to archive a mailing list, really...)

This is with reST off, though, because docutils likes to die “SEVERE”-ly if you just throw random garbage at it. However, the published result is cached (during each run), so that will only grow linearly.

In the common use case... this entry will hit nine pages (three of which are tags), and assuming stuff is actually filled up, index will cache everything that day and permalink need, year/month/tagindex don't use content at all, and the only really expensive thing will be republishing every old entry for each tag that it hits. I can live with that. And for all the recursion overhead, optimizing how much of the Maildir we really need to care about shouldn’t be very hard.

I just need some actual users to bitch at me about other stuff.

Okay, I’m putting this blog on Planet Debian... now. The old one is not gone yet, because I’m tired and I don’t think I’ll do it until tomorrow.

In a fit of hubris, I wrote some software to run this blog (which is just a bunch of generated static files), called Mnemosyne. I was bored of PyBlosxom and it was slow. I believe Erinn said something like, now it’s only a matter of time until I write my own RCS... If I get to that point I will really start worrying. If anyone is looking for something along these lines, please tell me what sucks and/or what is broken.

Anyway, rather than categorizing things (ugh), I’m just putting anything tagged “planet” in the feed that goes here. I think this will work better.

Oh, and I almost forgot: my blog now has automatic flooding-prevention. Nothing older than a day gets in this feed. I don’t know why feeds in general don’t have some sort of time limit.