I meant to write this earlier but I got carried away working on JoeBlogger
I'm moving to Boise for the next 5 months (back in July) to be with my wife. She is a doctor and her residency takes her to Boise for a year. She has already been out there since the beginning of July 2002, but it has been really hard being apart.
I've worked it out with my management so that I can telecommute. Everyone at MSFT has been super supportive about this. I think that the whole thing is just amazing. I'm looking forward to being able to really crank on stuff without all of the interuptions of being at the office.
Now all I have to do is avoid all of the "interuptions" at home
This is a test of an entry generated in my tool. I have to type in raw HTML right now, but everything appears to be working...
Here is a screen shot of the current UI:
Things yet to do...
I've also decided that storing the entries in an xml file per day is a bad idea. The timezones will get you. I store the timestamp on an entry using GMT but the XML file (which is used as input into the UI) is based on local time. I also use localtime all over the place in the UI. I'll probably move to a flat list of entries (one per XML file) at some point and just figure out the local day assignments at runtime. This will map much better to a real database anyway.
Radio screwed the pooch and deleted all of my data. That kind of put a rush on my own software.
Well, here it is. It isn't much right now but I can load up my data and generate an index page and RSS feed. I have to generate the xml files for entries by hand right now, but that will be one of the next things that I implement. After that, I'll generate an archive. The last thing I have to do before it will be usable is do an FTP upstreaming solution (similar to Radio, but one that doesn't hang)
Like I said -- .Net killed the Radio star
And life is grand
And I will say this at the risk of falling from favor
With those of you who have appointed yourselves
To expect us to say something darker
And love is real
And though I realize this is not a deep observation
To those of you who find it necessary
To conceal love or obscure it, as is the fashion
-- Camper Van Beethoven (from Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart)
More details:
Each day's worth of entries will be stored in an XML file. Schema TBD right now.
There will be a configure option for the root of the working directory of the site. This will default to {My Documents}JoeBlogger. Call this {Root}. Things will look like this:
{Root}
Config
Site1
Data
EveryPage
Bloglist.xml
FavoriteSong.xml
...
2003
01
23.xml
26.xml
...
Templates
RSS.xsl
Homepage.xsl
Day.xsl
...
OtherStuff
foo.jpg
otherpage.htm
Archive
2003
01
23.html
26.html
index.htm
rss.xml
Site2
...
Everything under the site dir will be uploaded. This means that the Data, templates and anything else anyone puts in this folder will be uploaded.
The Archive, index.htm file and rss.xml file will all be generated automatically. Every time the page generator runs, it will generate a source XML data document. This will include the relevant days along with the all of the xml files in the EveryPage directory. This will then be fed through the appropriate XSL sheet to generate the page. Note that this will always be an in memory XmlDocument and will probably never be persisted, except for debugging purposes. Here is what a source doc might look like:
<JoeBloggerData>
<EveryPage>
<File name="Bloglist.xml">
... verbatim paste of bloglist.xml here
</File>
... same for every file in the EveryPage dir
</EveryDay>
<Days>
<Day date="Sun, 26 Jan 2003">
... verbatim paste of 2003/01/26.xml here
</Day>
... every day relevant to this page.
</Days>
</JoeBloggerData>
Generating a page is now the simple matter of writting an XSL stylesheet that takes this source document and produces the correct output doc.
Okay, here is the deal. My weblogging software will be similar to Radio in the breakdown of client server, at least to start with. The client will do all of the page generation and formatting and then upload the result to the server.
However, there is still the problem where you then have one and only one computer that can produce entries. I say we solve this by uploading the raw data and templates up to the server too. Hell, it is just xml, right? It will take a little more room on the server but you get these advantages:
I think this will work out nicely. Here is my plan of attack:
I have 13 days left on my Radio free trial so I have this weekend and next weekend to get it to a stage where I can stop using radio. I'll also have to write a importer from Radio for the few entries that I have so far.
