Ha, I just read Michaels article on why he considers calendars on weblogs useless. Funny I read this right after implementing mine.

Well, the reason that I did mine is that I want my archives to be reachable in some fashion -- perhaps if only for google. A search or keyword "related" section would be more usable, for sure.

I have a calendar that now points to my archives. I think that I'm at feature parity with what I was using from Radio, at least with respect to blog generation. I didn't use any tables in my layout, so let me know if things don't look good in a browser other than IE for windows.

I think that I'm done for tonight. Next I'm going to work on an FTP upstreamer so that I can just hit a button (or work it on a timer/file system change notification) to upload the site instead of using SmartFTP to upload manually.

In some ways this would be a lot easier with a server side solution backed up to SQL server. I'm tempted to switch over, but I really do like the idea of client side+FTP.

Okay, Chris has put me to shame.

To try and redeem myself I have my archives working now. I also have permalinks.

I haven't uploaded posts in a couple of days as I renumbered all of my entries and I didn't want to screw everyone's Syndirella feed until I had permalinks and guids working.

To see some of the workings behind the scenes, here is the xslt for my main page.

I took this last night and this is what I got:

Which OS are You?

Doc had his laptop stolen. This is something that I worry about all of the time. However, I think that I have things set so that I wouldn't skip a beat if my laptop was gone. All of my files are shared between many programs using My Documents redirection. This server that these files are stored on is maintained by the MS IT department and is backed up by them. I use offline files to cache those files locally when I'm not connected. On top of that I checked the checkbox (it is that easy) to make my offline files encrypted. That way I don't worry about someone getting ahold of trade secrets either.

In fact, I recently just upgraded the hard drive on my laptop (to a sweet 60GB) and did a reinstall while I was at it. No problems and no data lost.

I now store the local time and GMT with each entry. This seems to me to be the right way to do this. The RSS feed is always GMT, but really, when you read a weblog, you want to know the local time when that was written. It really puts it in context.

This means that the entries on my weblog before the 5th are in PST and those after the 5th are in MST. I wish there were standard ways to name timezones but that all seems a little tricky.

With my current solution I can still keep all of my data in day based XML files. I'm just clear that an entry gets slotted into a particular file based on the local time when it was written.

In other news, Scott Watermasysk kindly offered to send me the source to his HTML editing control, pictured here. I'm scared of the legal implications of looking at others' source outside of MS. He may still send me the binaries though and those are fair game. One question Scott, where did you get the cool flat tab control? It looks like the one VS.Net uses.

ChrisAn says that I need to support permalinks. This is part of the plan but I need to renumber my entries (as I have duplicates now!) and I want to think long and hard about what I want my permalinks to be. I'd also like to do this only once so that I don't spam everyone using Syndirella or other RSS aggregators as my feed completely changes.

Ideally I'd like to create a page per day or per week and have the permalink point into that. However, I don't want to break links around midnight as I move back to Seattle at some point. I think that I'm going to start storing a time zone with each of my entries and use that to adjust when figuring out which entries go in which days.

In some ways this would be easier with a server side solution as I would just have an archive page that takes the entry number as a parameter. There are other advantages to the client side solution though.

I'm moved in and have a cable modem set up. I spent today buying all of that stuff you have to buy when you move.

But I think that I have everything that I need. I should be working again tomorrow. It was really amazing to me how fast everything went. I moved out here, got a cable modem, bought and set up a wireless router, recieved my Cisco ATA for vonage and plugged everything in. Everything worked flawlessly.

Oh, and it is nice to see my wife again too ;) Time to go to bed. I want to start getting up early so I can match Rachel's doctor schedule.