Wedding March or the Ides of March? :p

Since I am off the marriage stakes, my brother has become the latest contender in our family :p Of course, I’m sure that most you either know or have guessed by now that my own reluctance to be part of an arranged marriage stems from the fact that I’ve fallen in love with Jen <g> but be that as may be, my parents are actively searching for a bride for my brother now and he seems not too averse to the idea provided that they find a girl who meets his specifications. I should explain something here – or several things actually :p

The first thing is that in Sri Lanka (and in many other Asian countries too …) brothers usually get married according to age – so the younger brother cannot get married till the elder brother marries. It’s different for girls though – if you have a sister of marriageable age, you are supposed to get her married before you look into your own marriage :p For instance, my sister (who is three years younger than me) got married about ten years ago whereas my parents weren’t that particular about getting me married till recently and that too was probably because I was blocking the path to wedded bliss for my brother 🙂 Anyway, now that I have told my parents that I don’t want an arranged marriage (and that I would tell them once I’ve found the girl I want to marry – who incidentally is Jen and she tells me that she feels the same way but we still haven’t met in person …), they’ve decided that it’s time to concentrate on my brother.

Of course, that brings us to the second point – while love marriages do occur in Sri Lanka and other Asian countries, they still aren’t as common as arranged marriages by parents, especially in the more orthodox families. So my parents will try to find a Sri Lankan, Muslim (all of that is important to them :p) girl from a family that they deem is suitable and then the girl will have to fit my brother’s criteria and of course, he’ll have to be what she wants in a husband and finally the wedding (or at least the negotiations for a wedding) can take place. What a lot of work! :p

I am well and truly in the throes of creating another app :p The BlogMan prototype is coming along pretty well and I was actually able to connect to my Movable Type server yesterday and retrieve information about my blogs there. Retrieving posts and making posts is still going to take about a week to finish but we’re getting there. Of course, I’m already beginning to notice certain things such as the fact that I will probably need to either create a plug-in architecture or a separate API file since apart from the core Blogger API, Movable Type also seems to implement other access methods for features it has but Blogger doesn’t – such as the category feature. A plug-in architecture probably is the best since then I can support almost any blog server with XML-RPC capabilities but for the moment, I’m too lazy to do that and will probably go with a straight API file but keep the plug-in idea in mind. I won’t say more till I have actually gotten some of the other stuff to work since I have certain reservations but not sure if they are well founded or not.

I’ve also heard a few comments about Blog 7.0 linefeed conversion feature 🙂 Now, I had not even considered putting more than basic HTML formatting in my entries but I see that Rob has been using tables – sometimes I feel as if I am the person who least uses all the features/possibilities of Blog :p The easiest way not to have the linefeeds automatically insert line break tags into your tables is to have the table code and the contents in one complete line with no breaks at all. Yes, I realize that looks totally ugly and is hard to debug when a problem occurs but it will definitely keep the line break tags from appearing. The other thing I can think of is to use some sort of a new tag which will mark certain areas as non-parseable by Blog so that its completely bypassed by the Blog tag/linefeed parser. This might however, slow things down a bit and so there’s going to be a bit of a tradeoff in speed for clarity of entry.

Since so many people seem to be in favour of the calendar idea – I guess plug-ins are a definite feature to be implemented in the next major release of Blog. But just because I create a plug-in system, don’t expect me to create the calendar plug-in :p I might or might not since I’m way too lazy <vbg> I might simply convert the cookie tag into a plug-in, release the source and expect somebody else to do the actual work :p Of course, thinking about a plug-in architecture has brought up certain other difficulties that I had not considered at first. Blog relies heavily on database access but the plug-in creators might not have access to DBISAM to do any development work – so that means that I’ll probably have to create an internal Blog API which gives plug-in authors transparent access to the Blog databases. I am currently thinking of making it a simple function which takes an SQL statement and returns the results for the query as a variant array. Not sure if that will actually work since I haven’t tried it out yet but I’d like any input on the idea from the other developers out there. Anybody? 🙂