Sadly when I was working with Headlines I had not learned about RSS. Anyway, it was a project I wanted to do just to get the latest headlines from Linux Today. Then when I saw jEdit and the way its plugins worked I decided to extend it with plugins for various news sources. Had I come across this tutorial then, I would have designed Headlines differently.
It is a great introduction to RSS, not just what it is but why, how and ideas for what to syndicate!
Weblogging systems like Moveable Type, Blogger, Live Journal, GrayMatter is that they are all server side programs and require server side cgi support for it to work. Looking at the way Blogger worked I thought of making a client side application that generated the static web pages and uploaded them automatically to the server. This would mean I could host my weblog in any free site with ftp and huge webspace.
Well, when I got this server and moveable type, i sort of forgot all about it.
Today, when I found Kaa I just realized that someone has even implemented the idea I was toying with.
So many issues come into building web applications that we tend to ignore and not even realize many aspects of the system we are designing and building so coming across this guide to building secure web applications was really nice. While I haven't read much of it, I have bookmarked it as something I need to come back to later.
Jakarta Ant is a great, platform independent substitute for make. However, one must confess that it has evolved into more that just a build tool. I consider it as good as any shell script for automating regular tasks. So finding an equivalent being written in Python was nice. PyAnt is definitely a nice project. The main advantage it has over Jakarta Ant is the speed. Invoking a JVM really takes time.
I don't know if I would really use PyAnt, still looking at the code would be quite a learning experience.
May be this is the software I would have used to run by weblogs instead of Moveable Type if I had the time. Why? Just one reason, it is written in Python which means I can extend it the way I like. Definitely, something I would have tried out.
So which software is it? It is PyBlosxom. The idea of supporting many formats for input and output is really nice. Supporting either HTML or wiki markup is really nice.
There are many jukeboxes and many open source ones. Seen a few in Java. But finding the curses based Python mp3 juke box is real nice. Just the software I am interested in extending to learn curses programming. Anyway, the feature list is nice. May be I could extend it as an extended jukebox for FM radio stations.
Why don't you check it out at PyTone
Have been fooling around with MT. Learning quite a bit. May be would have learnt a lot more had I just read the manual but MT seems to be so easy and friendly, it doesn't just seem to need any of that. One nice thing about web interfaces is every thing is a wizard-like, step by step.
Often the lack of complex user interface components seems to be restrictive in making rich interactive user interfaces. However, I realized if unlike normal application where we do quite a few things in each screen if we do only one step in each screen the web interface can be much more friendlier and less restrictive user interface.
Anyway, back to MT. I need to learn how to work with categories!
Well, now that the MoveableType is configured, I need to choose a decent and simple template for my blogs. I don't know how customisable these templates are so will spend the next few days fooling around and testing the system. Since a little busy latesly, I will start serious blogging sometime later in October!
With a few entries in the trial blog SectorSix kept at Blogger, I felt I needed my own system where I had more control. So here is my new blog at shrestha.net.np along with my brother's blog!