Posts from April 2003

PHPetal is pretty cool

I think (can’t remember already – it’s been a long day!) I found this one care of a lead from the blosxom mailing list, but here’s a cool, web-based application which operates very similarly to the “PortaBlosx” idea that I am still thinking of working on. It’s called PHPetal and basically just provides a one-page interface to posting to your blosxom-powered blog. It looks pretty funky, although it’s a bit “heavy” for converting to a Palm version I reckon, so I will keep thinking about my own, simple version.

And Then It Was Live!

Yes, I finally got my new site live, and it all appears to be working, including the new and fancy, blosxom-driven “Notes” section.

This has taken quite a bit of work to get live, but I am quite happy with the way that things have turned out. The main addition(s) that I want to make at this stage are writebacks on my Notes section, so that I can hear what you guys out there have to say about things, rather than this being a 1-way only information device 🙂

Keep an eye out for the ability to comment on my postings here in the nearish future (hopefully!). When I get it working, it should also allow for trackbacks, so you can register comments on my posts on your own blogs if you like

Praise Be To Matt

Wow – I wasn’t expecting that. Unless it was a typo of some sort, this is what Matt had to say about my enrollment in the BArts(Net Studies);

I am the person who assesses these 🙂 – basically, I’d be looking at 8 units (out of 24) advanced standing – how does that sound?

and I was thinking – “bugger, that’s less than I was hoping for, so I trudged along to read the next message which said…

Just remembered – since you have units at Curtin already…12 units (which is the maximum I can give)…

and now, funnily enough, I have a very large smile on my face! This is excellent! With only 12 units remaining, I might still be able to finish by the end of 2004!

Slowly, slowly…

I am making progress on the new site. It is taking longer than I had hoped, but that is mostly because I actually took the time to enjoy my holiday, rather than spending the whole thing working on this 🙂

I am currently working on the Services section, which will include details about all of the things that I can do for clients, including some “elevator-pitch” style descriptions of what some of the things mean, since it’s likely that they will be new concepts for a lot of people I deal with. I am going to be trying to simplify things as much as possible with the descriptions, and provide examples or diagrams if at all possible!

It’s times like these that I wish CELIA was active already and filled with useful information and resources, then my job would be simple 🙂

More Projects To Come

The main 2 sections of the site to be completed are the projects (still have some micro-sites to put together here) and the search system. I will also need to bring across the copyright info from the old site, but that will largely be copy/paste. The search system will be the most interesting part to develop, and I have some nice plans for it as well – We’ll see what I can do as far as combining 2 XML documents and an XSLT together (server-side using PHP of course!) to create the results.

The projects really could use a little work, but I just don’t have time to work on them right now. Once the site is live, I will be working on RESTments again to get that going, and then when that is up, the projects will all receive a make-over to ensure that they work with PHP’s register_globals off and magic_quotes_gpc off as well. I will also eventually get to working on new versions of webpad (which I have some great plans for) and AvantBlog (want to make a few versions, so that there is one for each major type if possible.

So now, with no other external contracts to take up my time, it is just a matter of not falling asleep and then all I have to do is my website, should mean that it’s up within a week or 2.

Thankyou Matthew Allen

So far I have been dealing with Matthew Allen, the Coordinator for Internet Studies at Curtin Uni, who has been surprisingly helpful.

One thing that has really blown me away has been his willingness to suggest that I enrol via Open Learning Australia, which appears to be a much better method of study for me (assuming that I can maintain my own discipline), given that I currently work full time.

I have had to look again at what I wanted to do, because my previous enrolment attempt was unsuccessful. This is because all of the school-leavers get first option at the positions being offered, and they appear to have filled them all this year, so my application wasn’t even really considered. This left me with no enrolment, even though that’s what I had planned on doing. Enrolling through OLA allows me to start studying, without having to jump through the normal University hoops of enrolment. At OLA, I just sign up for the degree ($100), and then start studying units at my own pace.

This brings me to the next cool thing with OLA – the study periods. OLA works on 4 study periods, rather than the normal Uni-year of only 2 semesters. This means that if (theoretically,) I could keep up the pace of 2 units per study period (which I don’t think I can), then I would be able to complete the remainder of my 3 year degree (minus advanced standing) in about 2 years! Apart from this, it just means that you are much closer to being able to study at your own pace, since you have more control over your start-times and the time of year that you study — I like it.

I am in the final stages of completing my application for advanced standing, which will go along with my application for entry into the degree at Curtin, via OLA. Once that is done, I can hopefully get an idea of the number of units that I can “skip” when I start study, and know where to start with things. My official target is 9 units 🙂

Now Working on RESTy Archives

I seem to have sorted out the main code for making blosxom at least pretend to be RESTy, now I am working on the archives system to clean that up. It is largely based on the main code, but needs to take into account the “forced” /archives/ directory when working out relative paths and stuff like that.

Once this is complete, I will then start working on creating some templates for the actual site (coverting my Visio wireframes into real XHTML!).

RESTxom Now Has RESTy Archives

I have made it so that the /archives/ directory, from the root of the blog, houses all of the archives for the entire blog, organised by date. It simply parses the dates and then requests the details from blosxom. To sort out the issues related to relative vs. absolute references, I have added in # # #URL# # # (actually no spaces between any of the #’s) to the story template, which is replaced by my scripts with the root of the blog-tree when displaying it.

The only problem with this system at the moment is that I don’t think it’s actually passing the internal page anchor (after the #) when it displays the page, so it might not link down on the page to the specific post… I will have to experiment with this some more.

UPDATED: (about 3 seconds later) — it does load the correct place in the page, so it’s all good!

Good idea for the calendar in the archives…

Just had a good idea, it’d be nice to have the calendar display the month which the current (requested) post was made in. So if I just go directly to /archives/2003/12/* then it would display the month of December, 2003 in the calendar.

Shouldn’t be a hard modification to make, and I only have to make it to the archive processing script – so should be easy. I’ll add it before the site goes live.

Where Are You Stanford?

Lisa Chan from Stanford emailed me, wanting to know if we could work together on building a search log analyzing system. I emailed her back with a stack of the details of stuff that I was planning and haven’t heard back… I wonder why not? Maybe she’s taken my ideas and is off building it without me?

UPDATE: I still haven’t heard from Lisa 😛