Will's blog

It's been a month since my last blog entry. I haven't done any blog updates since I haven't really made any progress with anything. Nonetheless, here's an update of where things are.

My algorithms course is just killing me. I'm doing some 40 hours of homework and studying for it each week and ... there are still some topics that I haven't really wrapped my head around. My computer systems course, however, is pretty easy--for some bizarre reason I'm very familiar with much of the material we've covered so far.

I've been very slowly working through PyBlosxom 1.3. It's going to contains a series of bug fixes (I have to re-organize everything so I know which ones have gone in so far) and also an overhaul of the flavour code allowing for flavour directories, subdirectory handling in the flavourdir, shipped flavours (better ones), ATOM 1.0, RSS 2.0, and hopefully with the changes it'll be much easier for people to build new flavours, package them up, and ship them around in a way that's trivial to install. That's the theory.

I think the ATOM 1.0 flavour is done--I need to do some more testing with it. I think I'll do this by upgrading my blog to the code in CVS and working with it there.

I don't think I've finished with the RSS 2.0 code yet. I don't remember where I am with that.

I'm trying to figure out how to pull images, css files, and other flavour-helper content in a flavour directory and source it through PyBlosxom. I think I may build a handler for it and have the handler kick off before the default blosxom_handler. It would then figure out which flavour is being displayed by looking at the referer and various other things available, check to see if the image/css file is there, and serve it if it is. I'm pretty sure there are corner cases here. It'd be nice if people could turn on and turn off this feature, too, since it could cause issues with other plugins. Though since it's a handler that runs if none of the other handlers ran, maybe it's not a big deal. It still needs thought. (Also, this isn't a comprehensive description.)

Also, I need to put together (or at least start putting together) a TODO list for the web-site. I'm having huge problems wrapping my head around this, though. I'd love to do this as a plugin, but... I think I may end up doing it all by hand. The other possibility is to enter in all the items into the SF bug and feature trackers--but I really dislike them. Tempting thoughts would be to move all development to my server, installing subversion and Trac, and doing the whole thing with those. But... that's a lot of work and it puts me in a position where I can't just throw my hands in the air and walk away.