Most posts will probably end up in this category one way or another, because I tend to write a lot about technology and tech-related topics. I work online and really enjoy gadgets and gizmos, so a lot of what I get involved in revolves around those subjects. Anything from regular expressions to iPods to The Magic Bullet is fair game.
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!)
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.
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!
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!
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 😛
New tool being created to analyse the logs of a search interface and pull out information about the most searched for terms, things returning lots of (or no) results, plus information regarding best bets.
Just kidding, but I got some details back from Lisa C, and she appears to have some very specialised requirements for her system. I have suggested that it might be better if we work together to develop a “base system” which would include the complete logging functionality, and then she can customise and/or extend the reporting/analysis interface as required.
I think this approach should work quite well, allowing me to collaborate on a logging module, and to refine the database schema, then develop a generic, “useful-across-the-board” analysis interface, which should be capable of being extended easily. Metabase, here I come.
Work on my site is coming along. I have added in blosxom v1.1, which went pretty much without a hitch. I had to modify my template slightly, but that was more because of my dodgy custom handling, rather than anything to do with blosxom itself.
I’ve been spending some time on the projects section, getting the project pages up to scratch and re-formatted; it’s looking pretty good. I am taking a few of the old projects offline, because they don’t have any documentation, don’t work anymore, things like that 🙂
I’m not going to put a date on when the site will be live, but given the current progress, and the list of things to do still, I would estimate about 2 weeks. Here’s the current list;
So there we go. That’s what I’ll be working on in the near future. And for those interested, I will be creating a custom search system, which integrates Google‘s results for within my website (using XooMLe) with a selection of manual “Top Picks” or “Best Bets” which I have selected for certain terms. I have the rough idea planned out already, just need to implement it in code. I will probably make the code available for download once it’s complete as well, so keep an eye out for that 🙂
That’s all for now – time to get back to life.
Fortnightly articles/reports posted by Monsieur Guru Nielsen himself. Some of these are pretty good, personally I think some of them are just plain stupid.
An example of taking things too far: in the most recent alertbox, Nielsen extrapolates his calculated statement that the companies he studied which would “spend $3,042 per employee annually to cover time spent on the sixteen tasks we measured” to mean that if we improved intranets to the best ones they saw in their tests, we would “save the world economy $1.3 trillion per year”… come on dude, seriously. You so can’t make that assumption.
RESTments? REST-based comments for RESTxom
Am working on a commenting system for RESTxom which will store a parallel file for each entry called “<entry>.comments” and will act like a small flatfile database to store comments for each post, which will also, of course, have REST-friendly URLs.