4-23-03 Refactoring the Weblog
Apologies for the long delay. I'm still coming down from what may have been
the best seminar I've ever given - the new Thinking in Patterns last week
in New Hampshire. For some reason I was especially "on" the last couple of weeks,
and made very significant changes to the material in the seminar, as well as the book,
adding examples and exercises and making big improvements to existing examples. I think
I've made a big step forward on that project, and look forward to giving the improved
version in Prague. More on that, and the book, later.
You'll notice that the format of the web log is different. Now there's one file per
entry, each entry has a title and date, and the main page takes you to an index of all the
entries, sorted so that the most recent entries appear on the top. In addition, when you go
to a particular entry you'll see that the most recent entries are listed along the left side
along with a link to the master index at the top.
Much of this is intended to make the log easier to read and navigate (and for me to
maintain, for that matter). However, a primary reason for the reorganization is to support
RSS, since each entry now has the necessary information in a form that can be easily extracted
by a Python program running under Zope. Of course, I won't know that for sure until I write
the program, but I think it will work.
I learned a lot in the process of reorganizing the pages just to work by hand. For some
reason, in order to implement the "short index" you see down the left side of this article,
I had to change the type of document from CMSTX to DTML (Zope document types). However, this
was not particularly painful, since it primarily meant just adding <p> tags at the
beginning of each paragraph, and I think these would have been necessary anyway for the
RSS feed to work.
It often makes sense to do things by hand for the initial experiments, since you get a better
sense of what's necessary to solve the problem before you attempt to automate.
