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Still in deep. Things are going well though (or at least they seem to be, given my lack of any formal testing ability.) Here's a few links I came across today while looking for other things:

Rebecca Blood (of Rebecca's Pocket) has a book coming out titled The Weblog Handbook.

Scoble reports on a brief demonstration of blogger pro ($5/month.)

Techno-weenie has posted an RFC on creating a "common XML-RPC API for weblogs." I'd support something like this but I wonder how useful it will be. The best reason to have so many different blogging (or knowledge management, or whatever) products is that they all work a little bit differently. I might try to support a common API, but not if I had to give up some of the stranger features I have built into my system. And if the structures of different systems are too different then the XML-RPC is going to be a mess. Or, in other words, the problem is here:

option (struct) -- extra weblog-specific options passed in the format parameter_name => parameter_value. Ideally, the options should be totally optional and the XML-RPC methods should function correctly without them.
Ideally maybe, but at least in my case, the option struct would have to contain lots of crucial information (given the rest of the structure presented.)
- jim 1-24-2002 7:44 pm [link] [1 comment]

Two pages of pictures of 76 Clinton St. progress.
- jim 1-24-2002 4:13 pm [link] [1 comment]

Well, I'm sure you're dying for an update.

The new system (running locally on my production server) is almost usable. Note that this does not mean it is close to being done. At this point I can:

create pages
edit pages
view pages
post
add comments
edit posts and comments

None of these are tested very well. I'm still trying to figure a way to write a tool that will help me test (basically a tool that can simulate many different posts and edits from many different simulated users.) Right now in order to test I make a bunch of different accounts, sign in as different people, make posts, sign out, and then sign in as someone else and see if everything is OK. This takes a lot of time, and it is not very thorough. That's why everyone here has discovered so many bugs.

In addition to that testing tool (which I may not be able to write) I still have to enable the following:

admin
subscribe
upload
user
index

These should be easier than what I've done already. Post, edit, and the main script that draws the pages, as well as the one that draws comment pages, are where most of the changes are.

Then, when that is all done I have to write something to transfer the old database (I'm going to start with a different site than this one as the test, but it has the same database structure as this site so I should only have to write the translator once) into the new format. This is always tricky.

Could be done with just a few more full days work if I don't hit any snags.
- jim 1-23-2002 9:54 pm [link] [add a comment]

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