I have added a simple calendar which will be displayed in the place of a @ CALENDAR@ tag in your RESTxom templates (head or foot preferably!)
The calendar will include links to any days which contain posts, and those links will go directly to the archives, where that day will be shown, and you can locate whichever post interests you. I’d like to add support for allowing the browsing of months, but the handling of the 403 errors doesn’t seem to allow that…?
After joining the AIfIA (and paying the membership fee), I have been somewhat disappointed with the response I received from the CELIA idea.
I signed up for the IA Library project with AIfIA, and have suggested that perhaps CELIA could be done as a part of that project, but have received no response. Zero. Nada. Zip.
I think Karl and I are going to start planning it out a little, hopefully I will be able to knock together a simple-ish system which can handle the stuff we would be working with, and that would allow us to get started. I think it’s a really valuable thing, and something that perhaps isn’t as important is the US, because IA is more established, but it sure is important here, where I have met all of about 3 people who even took a punt on what Information Architecture is!
When I thought I had “finished” the mainline code for RESTxom, I forgot that I hadn’t thoroughly tested the RSS code (allowing you to request rss.xml from any topic and get a correct feed from that point ‘down’). Turns out it doesn’t work properly… double-slashing problems and whatnot, shouldn’t be too hard to fix hopefully, but darned annoying in the meantime.
So off I go to fix the RSS code, then have to fix it in the archives as well (which are working now!)
The plan with these helper scripts that I am writing is that blosxom will be able to operate in a “REST-like” environment. This means that directing a browser to a URL like /blogging/blogger.com/ should load the blog entries in that directory (if it is within a defined blog-tree).
It’s working so far, and I have added in the option of linking to ‘rss.xml’ within any directory in the blog-tree to get an RSS feed of that level/category/sub-blog. Sweeeet. Next up is to eliminate the permalinks needing to use the blosxom.pl script in the URL (i.e. so that archives don’t have to link to blosxom.pl at all).
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.
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!
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.
blosxom is the amazingly simple, yet endlessly powerful blogging application written by Rael Dornfest which is now running most of the DentedReality website.
I have made some pretty schmick “helper” scripts (even if I do say so myself), which allow me to manage a blog using directories, and you can link straight to a directory, and it will show you the blog entries via blosxom in that dir.
There appears to be something dodgy going on with my paths. They aren’t resolving properly, which is causing internal links to be one or more levels (directory-speaking) out of whack.
This is really annoying… until I fix this I can’t really work on the commenting system, and I’m not launching the new Dented Reality website without the ability for people to comment on posts… no way!
Changes are afoot
I am re-writing a large proportion of the code which runs RESTxom, to make it more portable and reliable. Also trying to make sure that *everything* works properly, rather than getting any nasty surprises down the line!
Once this is done properly, then RESTments should be pretty simple(?) to add in.