bmabray's Journal: Weblog In Beta

My new weblog is now in beta -- that doesn't really mean anything, it's just fun to say. I will continue to update this one until I iron out some of the workings of the new one.

The whole idea behind this new weblog is to be able to write new entries anywhere, whether I have access to the Internet or not. That's why HandX's Weblog for PalmOS program seemed perfect -- I could write on my PDA, and upload it whenever.

Well, I realized this weekend, it's not perfect. HandX puts all the entries for one day into a single file. That's fine if you're only making entries from your PDA, but if you're writing & uploading from different sources, things are going to get out of order. I could write the script to open each file, look for a date/time stamp for each entry, put all the entries in a huge array (or hash, or whatever), sort them, then print them, but that seems overly complicated, and it could get slow. It also makes it impossible to have permanent links to individual entries.

Also, HandX has another program -- WinLog. This one is for writing entries on a Windows computer. Problem is, it works just different enough from the Palm version to make using them both almost impossible.

Here's how things basically work. Each entry is in a separate file, the name of which contains the date & time when it was written. These files are opened by my script and printed in order by date -- with the newest on top. This system makes various features I have in mind easier to implement. And it will be easier to transition to a database version, whenever I do that.

The tricky part is writing and uploading the entries, but I've also created some solutions for that. On Audrey, I have a text editor and script that automatically uploads the files. For Windows computers, I've created something even better -- Blog Goat! I wrote a simple text editor that automatically generates the proper file names for the entries. I also have a batch file that uploads the files. I should be able to combine the two (along with some other features) to make Blog Goat a very simple way to create weblog entries.

I'm not sure yet how the HandX program is going to fit into this. My best idea right now is to write a program that, after I upload the entries using HandX, would download them, split them into separate files, and upload them again. This seems messy, but I don't see much else I can do, other than learn how to write my own PalmOS applications. I don't think I'm quite ready for that... :-)

I know, I'm sure there is software out there that will do all that I am doing, but what fun would that be?