Dev-Picayune

I finally came up with a name for my blogging system other than “Stupid Blogging System”.  “Pumpkinvine” is the name I came up with while talking to my wife about it.  We thought it would be neat to have some local reference in the name.  The Pumpkinvine Creek is a fairly famous winding creek that runs near our house and we can walk to it from the nature trails in our neighborhood.  The Pumpkinvine is particularly well known for its meandering path as it flows for many miles yet ends up almost where it started.  I thought that was particularly appropriate since Brandon described my blog development as “wandering” and indeed it has been.

Most recently, I have implemented most of the MetaWeblogAPI. This has enabled me to try out a greater range of blogging clients than just ones that supported the Blogger API which is extremely limited without adding to it.  Once I implemented the XMLRPC API stuff, I realized that I needed at least a little bit of refactoring to be moderately at peace with my code.  So I ended up moving functions around and renaming all the peaces to fit with the new name for my project.  If I ever do end up writing a blogging client tool, the obvious name choice would be PumpkinSeed.

The cool thing is that I am able to blog from Firefox using the Perfomancing plug-in. That gives me a consistent tool that’s cross platform. At the rate their going, I can’t imagine being able to come up with a better tool. However, it would be nice to have something portable I can keep on a thumb drive, so I still may need to look into other client alternatives.

Technorati Tags: XMLRPC, Blogger, MetaWeblogAPI, PHP, blog, Pumpkinvine

I am still not sure if I totally buy into the whole Technorati Profile concept. But just for kicks, I am going to try using some Technorati tags as well as del.icio.us tags here in the near future since some of the blog client tools I am trying out support them semi-natively.

As part of my effort to redo the sites (internally) and free myself from Blogger.com since it seemed to be broken for me,
I’ve got Dev-Picayune now up and working. I thought it would be cool as part of it’s makeover to use a subdomain and move
everything over. So now I have clean URL’s (better permalinks) using my new blogger.com free stupid blog software.


Just to give a brief outline at how it works…

• blog entries are stored as text files in a subdirectory
• the first line of each entry is the header which is pipe (|) delimited
• the remaining lines are the content of the entry which require no special markup other than to be valid XHTML once inserted inline into a web page
• new entries are added by first creating a text file (with a manually created header) and then ftp’ing the file to the web-site
• a special PHP page that can be requested from the site reindexes all of the blog entries in the subdirectory and builds a master index text file that contains the header line from each entry
• the PHP URL parsing is used extensively to determine what page is actually being requested to figure out which entry(ies) to fetch and display
• the archive handling PHP code parses the URL and can determine whether the request is for a year, a month, or a specific entry
• to the end user, the URL looks like a subdirectory and individual pages (supposed to be better for search engines as well)
• the same index file and text files are used via PHP to dynamically generate the RSS 2.0 feed
• new features (like recent entries or popular entries or special feeds) should be easier to add using the system
• in a similar fashion to the blog utilities, links to other sites are driven by a PHP indexing page that pulls data from del.icio.us and reformats the links

Eventually I need to build a simple utility for creating the new entries without all the manual steps. Ideally it will actually sync with the site and allow for editing of old entries as well as publishing new entries.

The point is, though, that while the outside looks basically the same, the internal workings have been completely redone. Fun stuff. It’s certainly more PHP than I ever wanted to know.