Paul R. Potts
I’ve finally been able to do a little cleanup on the weblog. The situation was this: after a bunch of edits, a large number of individual files now had the same modification date; they all appeared as brand new. This is Blosxom’s default behavior. I have now installed a plug-in which will allow me to edit files after posting them without changing the display order. It will work, of course, but like most tools of this type it is a hack upon a hack upon a hack, all to make up for the lack of true metadata. I’ve forced the modification dates on various files using touch -t. I don’t know the exact creation dates of many of these files; it came as a bit of a shock to me that UNIX variants do not preserve a separate timestamp for the creation date. I guess I’ve never noticed that before, and never had need for a separate creation date when working on a generic Linux or Solaris box, while MacOS systems and Windows systems preseve that extra bit of metadata.
Anyway, the upshot is that the mess is mostly cleaned up. I’m a bit frustrated that I can’t reconstruct the original dates (and thus the order) of a number of my posts. From now on I will try to remember to include the date in the file. There is a plug-in that will read the date from the entry metadata, if I supply it, but that requires a number of Perl modules which I’m not sure I can install given that I’m running hosted… and I just don’t want to wrestle with debugging the whole mess via web server logs at the moment.
A bigger question is “How can I make it easier to write entries?” I was using a demo license for TextWrangler, and liked it for the nice built-in FTP support, but I don’t have the extra cash to purchase a copy. I also hate having to write pseudo-HTML, writing tags even to force a paragraph break. There should be automatic capture of metadata; there should be automatic archiving and aging of posts. Versioning would be lovely; Twiki uses RCS files quite transparently; something like that is in order. I grew to like the Twiki inline formatting, and there is a Wiki formatting plug-in for Blosxom, but all Wikis are different. I used to enjoy messing with all this, but for once I would just like to use the tools, not configure and hack them. By the time I get everything formatted, links fixed, tags corrected, saved, FTP’ed, and checked, I’ve used up my free time and lost interest in what I was writing anyway. Maybe after Christmas vacation (which will be all too brief and not very relaxing, as usual) I’ll see if I can make use of WebDAV to simplify the posting process and get the weblog back on track. My devoted readers (both of them) can’t wait, I’m sure!