August 22, 2002

Work on Blog 7.0 is actually progressing much faster than I thought! (I really shouldn’t be surprised since this usually seems to be the way things go with any project I undertake – I say it’ll take a long time, I then do it really quickly and then it goes in to a long beta cycle and it still ends up taking a long time :p) I’ve completed the code on the digest feature – which will allow Blog in Server mode to send out a weekly or monthly digest of entries to subscribed users – and the remote comments – which allows users to have comments on their blog with no need for PHP or ASP or Perl or any other software on their server -. There are a bunch of new Blog tags to accommodate all of these new features. I’ve also added a backup option to allow people to backup their Blog data files and a repair option for them to repair a damaged data file from within Blog itself. Of course, I’m not going to be able to test the repair option completely and so will have to go with it on faith :p

While that’s a whole bunch of new features, that’s not all that I want to do for Blog 7.0 🙂 I want to add an entry category feature which allows you to categorize your entries and to display archives by category. There are a couple of minor questions/problems there. The first problem is that I’ll need to do a UI change to accommodate the category and the main Blog screen is crowded enough as it is :p Guess, I’ll probably have to either shorten the title field and put it as a drop down next to it or create a new slide out panel which hides the preview pane until you click the preview button. But the next question is about the category feature itself – while it would be fairly simple to tag an entry as belonging to a particular category, I don’t think it would be that simple in practice. I know that in my posts I talk about various things, so how can I be content with only one category per entry? The ideal situation would be to have multiple categorizations per entry but that could turn out to be a coding nightmare :p Guess I’ll first have to see how best I can do the coding and then go with the easiest option for the moment …

Tags: General
Posted by Fahim at 6:39 am   Comments (7)

7 Responses to

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#1
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DeViLbOi 22 August 2002 at 12:07 pm

To do multiple catagories couldn’t you do something like and do something similar to the “like” search option for SQL? But then again you are not using the simple and easy XML format, you had to use a damn database. So you would have to come up with fields for all of your categories and do a select on those with X’s or some crap. Man…why couldn’t you just use XML? *shakes his head*

#2
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Rob 22 August 2002 at 3:37 pm

Personally, I love the category idea. In looking at my own blog, I find that I have various and sundry topics at any one time. The question, beyond how you store them in Blog, is how am I going to display them on my blog? Have a category selector button?

Hmm.

BTW: Have you thought about adding voting/polling?

#3
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TrialAndError 22 August 2002 at 4:48 pm

Fahim,

Thought you might be interested in this. It is basically a does rss autodiscovery and could be useful in Blog or even in Snipper.

http://diveintomark.org/archives/2002/08/15.html#ultraliberal_rss_locator

I guess I see Blog also being used as a news publisher/aggregator for those who do not write every day but would like to share content that they also read.

Just a thought.

TrialAndError

#4
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Fahim 24 August 2002 at 3:02 pm

XML might not be the panacea you think it is :p Try using XML to do what Blog does over a period of years with the accumulated data and see if you can get the same performance and the features – bet you won’t be able to since data access is much slower 🙂 You need to use the right tool for the right job <vbg>

#5
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Nige 25 August 2002 at 1:17 am

Hmm sounds excellent Fahim. Will the comments function operate via email like the remote posting? And can I put in a plea here for a set-up wizard for newbies?

#6
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Fahim 25 August 2002 at 4:18 pm

Yes, the comments works just like the remote entries. And while the set up wizard is in the to-do list (did you suggest that originally, Nige?) I don’t think it will make it for the 7.0 release – there’s just too many goodies in there already :p

#7
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Nige 26 August 2002 at 4:37 am

Yep, I suggested the wizard (see other comment). 🙂

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