XML Blog Stuff IRC Ramblings

<nlindblad> anyone using LightPress then?
<nlindblad> http://lightpress.org/
<nlindblad> looks interesting
<sward> nlindblad: It's PHP (nevermind a plugin for another PHP app), I lost any interest I may have had in it
<nlindblad> sward: what CMS would you use then?
<sward> nlindblad: I don't :)
<nlindblad> sward: okey...
<nlindblad> sward: what would you recommend then
<sward> nlindblad: I wouldn't, I'm not a big fan of CMSes, at least not in the "dynamic page generation from static content in a data store which only looks dynamic because it's updated often" sense
<nlindblad> ah
<nlindblad> sward: true
<nlindblad> sward: I'm really after something I can update without having to use vim all the time
<sward> nlindblad: and vim's a problem because?  I find it better than a textarea
<nlindblad> sward: hmm
<h|barbobot!n=h@pdpc/supporter/sustaining/h-barbobot> vim is no problem.
<nlindblad> sward: I'll just do a neat page then and use vim and shut up, etc.
<sward> nlindblad: Not that I have a website to manage.. I mean, the one page I have up hasn't changed for 3 years, except for updates to my CV and text ever so slightly modified to be past tense (I am studying.. -. I studied, blah)
<nlindblad> :P
<StarScream> i really should make a website for my self some day
<sward> nlindblad: For anything more complex, I'd probably look into an XML-based system, but the resulting pages are generated by me (or automagically as I add content) (probably XSL transformations), rather than having the content pulled from a DB and generating pages dynamically.
<Dave2> XML!
<sward> nlindblad: Even with caching, dynamic generation in that way seems a bad method
<nlindblad> sward: TBH, Gentoo's XML policies are lovely
<nlindblad> sward: it's so easy to write content for their site
<nlindblad> sward: XML is neat
<nlindblad> sward: but the question is then
<nlindblad> sward: how would one go on about doing it properly
<nlindblad> sward: my idea is to make separate XML-documents for each "post" then merge them into a static page using Python in chronological order after their <date> tags
<sward> nlindblad: For journal type stuff, yeah, possibly.  You may not even need XML documents for each post, just plain text which gets included into XML, though that doesn't help with how you get the date.  I don't think file modification times are sufficient.
<nlindblad> yeah
<nlindblad> http://pastebin.com/683246
<sward> Heh, just had a thought.. changelog format is essentially the same as a journal, and vim has nice macros to manipulate changelogs
<h|barbobot!n=h@pdpc/supporter/sustaining/h-barbobot> vim uber alles!
<sward> nlindblad: In your example post, too much crap.  You want it simple.
<nlindblad> well
<sward> nlindblad: It can be an XML fragment, rather than a complete XML document, so you can probably leave out the header crap
<nlindblad> <time> is probably crap
<nlindblad> sward: true
<nlindblad> http://pastebin.com/683252
<sward> nlindblad: Yeah, make date + time = <date>, and in ISP format
<sward> ISO
<nlindblad> yeah
<sward> nlindblad: If you want to separate them, it's designed to be easy to process, so... process it :)
<nlindblad> http://pastebin.com/683255 then
<nlindblad> the point of having <title> is for automatically generating the navigation
<nlindblad> and to have a real title that is a bit bigger than the content
<nlindblad> sward: the idea is that you shouldn't have to care about what you name the files
<sward> Agreed
<nlindblad> sward: as long as you put all the posts in a pre-defined directory the Python-script should look at the date and properly generate
<sward> although I think nice names are better than some crap hash
<nlindblad> yeah
<nlindblad> the ideal thing would be to have a vim-skeleton defined for the post directory
<nlindblad> so vim /postdirectory/somefile
<nlindblad> would create a new skeleton with empty tags
<nlindblad> (if somefile doesn't exist)
<sward> also, if your blog links to "full" versions of posts where you can add comments and such, then the server should serve it as http://host.domain.tld/blog/nice_name instead of crap like http://host.domain.tld/blog/2006/04/21/<number-assigned-to-the-current-phase-of-the-moons-of-jupiter>/$(cat /dev/urandom | base64encoder)/shit_name
<nlindblad> sward: hmm
<sward> date, long title, author.. all meta-data rather than URI material, though that does bring the "how do you ensure each name is unique?" question
<nlindblad> sward: I don't intend to keep the directory with posts in the htdocs
<nlindblad> sward: so what you're saying makes perfect sense, generate standalone pages and make nice URIs
<sward> I wouldn't, but you want to be able to generate reasonable output files
<nlindblad> sward: what tags would you use then?
<nlindblad> to be exact
<sward> not sure.. within the confines of XML, you've about minimised the amount of faff you need to put in as much as you can
<sward> you'd probably do better generating an index
<astopy> putting the date in the URI is a good idea
<sward> then you can setup something to "add a post", and it'll fill in the date for you, so you can get rid of that
<nlindblad> sward: yeah, preferably a small Python-script simply taking input
<sward> once the post is in the index file.. it won't be overwritten (unless you tell "add a post" to), so existing dates won't get changed to the current date
<nlindblad> sward: but somewhere along the road I think I should be a bit different to other traditional blogs
<sward> I know someone who did a set of XML templates for his site at one point, maybe I'll steal from him
<nlindblad> http://pastebin.com/683281
<nlindblad> yes, alot of tags
<nlindblad> but the metadata helps you create some cool stuff out of it
<sward> it might be useful to separate metadata from the content.. most of that I'd want to auto generate
<nlindblad> sward: you mean to put "easy to generate" stuff in a <metadata> tag?
<sward> for example, if I wanted to create an id (reference) for a post.. I'd process the title into some canonical form which is valid for ids
<nlindblad> true
* h|barbobot rips the aristocrats
<nlindblad> the thing is
<sward> name can be obtained from your user name, e.g. like mutt fills in 'Simon Edward Ward' in my From: address
<nlindblad> I must settle for a DTD before I can continue doing real code
<nlindblad> yeah
<nlindblad> http://pastebin.com/683287
<nlindblad> now all data intended to be auto-added is in the <meta> tag
<nlindblad> *are
<sward> nlindblad: I'll start putting stuff up at http://projects.bleah.co.uk/misc/wiki/XmlBlog .. I'm actually interested in seeing this work
<sward> nlindblad: Feel free to edit the page and add new sub-pages (assuming I let anonymous do that...)
<nlindblad> okey
<nlindblad> I will
<nlindblad> I'll dig through my XML books later on
<nlindblad> but I think http://pastebin.com/683304 is a good start
<nlindblad> if I've understood DTD a bit
<sward> balls, the person who I thought did a pure XML-based template system didn't.. he used Smarty
<nlindblad> :(
<nlindblad> sward: but that is all the DTD required to syntax-check a post
<sward> It should be easy enough, given this XML system, to write stuff to post using the blogger API too
<nlindblad> sward: yeah
<sward> XSLT transform to blogger API XML-RPC... HTTP POST
<sward> well, probably not that simple, but it was an idea :)
<nlindblad> when the basic XML is completed and the parsing is also done
<nlindblad> extending will be very easy
* nlindblad wonders whether a XML-validator in Python would require hours and hours of work
<resiak> I'm sure that one exists
<sward> if not, the various XML libs are a good way there
<nlindblad> I've done some simple thing with SAX
* sward -> pub -> home
<nlindblad> http://pastebin.com/683364
<nlindblad> where to go on from here?
<nlindblad> the idea is to make the parsed data ready for output