Hmmm...

By Miguel Diaz 25 May 2004

One must wonder what the point of selecting usernames is if we display our real names…not that I care…

I like cheese

By Miguel Diaz 24 May 2004

just thought I’d let you know…

<p>don&#8217;t know that I like &#8216;draft&#8217; being the default&#8230;</p>

new beginnings

By anders pearson 24 May 2004

here it is. the new version of the thraxil code. sorry it took so long. i was plagued with cable modem and hardware problems.

it’s not much right now. i have lots of ideas for new stuff, but first i just wanted to duplicate most of the already existing functionality. so this initial release is just with a basic feature set.

there are some major architectural changes here:

  • the backend is now written in python instead of perl. that’s the biggest one.
  • when you post, it publishes everything to static HTML files which apache can serve real quickly. the old version served everything up dynamically (with some caching, but every request would still incur a relatively large amount of processing). so when you post now, expect it to take a minute or two (while it writes out new index files, etc. and i have plans on making this even faster.) but requesting other pages should be very fast.
  • no more reliance on postgresql. i couldn’t get away from databases entirely, so i’m now using SQLite, which is small, light, fast, simple, and doesn’t require a complex installation.
  • comments are now open. ie, you don’t have to create an account before you can post comments.
  • there is no more distinction between diaries and front-page. my intention is really to decrease the emphasis on the front-page; it’s just a listing of what’s going on with a bunch of different users’ individual weblogs. i may even change it so only post titles show up on the front page.
  • you can’t edit your templates anymore. instead, you can edit the CSS files for your weblog. i’ve gone out of my way to make the markup exceptionally semantically rich so it’s easy to style. if you don’t think you can do a lot with just the CSS files, go check out the CSS Zen Garden for inspiration. you might not want to get too crazy with the custom CSS in the next week though since i haven’t really finalized the templates.
  • the new data model for the backend will allow me to add features like versioning and other cool stuff.

other misc. features:

  • formatting is now done with textile
  • you can publish a ‘Draft’ of a post which won’t actually be displayed on the site, but it will let you preview it and edit it later.

i haven’t put any real work into the visual design yet, so it’s ugly for now. deal.

this is still beta code, and i haven’t tested it too much, so expect bugs. report them as comments on this post please.

my short TODO list in roughly the order of importance:

  • –clean up UI / design–
  • -Atom feed-
  • -ensure XHTML compliance on all pages-
  • -search-
  • -metadata fields (you’ll see a box for this in the posting interface. doesn’t really do much yet.)-
  • -performance improvements on publishing-
  • trackbacks
  • versioning / diffs
  • comment preview
  • -comment management (ie, allowing you to delete comments from posts)-
  • user info
  • related entries
  • Atom API
  • monthly indices formatted as calendar
  • multi-image zip upload
  • image gallery / slideshow
  • search results as RSS / Atom
  • PGP signed posts / comments
  • post in future
  • automatic extraction of EXIF data from images
  • email integration (eg, comment notification via email)

basically, lots of stuff planned. we’ll see how slowly i actually get around to doing it.

Hmmm?

By Thanh Christopher Nguyen 25 Apr 2004

How the hell do you get diary entries to show up on the main page of my user interface page? Everytime I click on myself, I get that there were no new messages posted, and I’m wondering… Where the hell did that entry go, and then have to find it in my posts.

new version coming soon

By anders pearson 24 Apr 2004

i’ve got the new thraxil codebase working well enough that i’m about ready to release it. the main problem right now is that my cable modem has been down for the last week or so. i’ve been doing the development on my home machine, so without a network connection i can’t really do the upgrade very well. before i can move us to the new code, i have to write a script or two to import the old entries.

anyway, just thought i’d let people know that i haven’t been completely lazy lately and that there may be some big changes around here in the next week or so.

Diary

By Thanh Christopher Nguyen 22 Apr 2004

Jeremy Labbe is back in Worcester, if anyone else was looking for him. I love that man. And… I got to spend some time with Anders last weekend, where I think I talked his ear off, but he put up with me anyway. We’re getting to be old men, but at least I have that asian blood that, if I were ever to lose my sense of morality, would allow me to walk into any highschool pretending to be a new student, and gain access to young, firm ass.

inside a NeXT

By anders pearson 09 Apr 2004

my new workstation arrived today so, to clear up space for it on my desk, i finally decided to get rid of the old NeXTstation Turbo that i inherited from <a rel=”friend met” href=”http://www.thegogglesdonothing.com/“ title=”the goggles do nothing”>peter</a>.

before it went, i figured it would be fun to open it up and see what it looked like on the inside. here are <a href=”http://thraxil.org/images/2004/04/next/“ title=”NeXT guts”>some pictures</a>. it was also a good excuse to play with the macro settings on my camera.

interesting things to note: first, there is no mount for the hard drive; it’s just plugged in and sitting on top of the motherboard. if you shake the case it rattles around. second, it is remarkably dust-free. for a machine as old as it is, it’s practically spotless inside. it’s probably been cleaned a few times before i got it, but i know that at least in the last year it hasn’t been cleaned at all. every other computer in our office accumulates an inch thick layer of dust in that timespan. third, it certainly wasn’t designed to be very expandable. i guess you could replace the hard drive and upgrade the RAM a bit, but otherwise there’s nothing like the PCI expansion slots in most intel PCs. perhaps it isn’t a coincidence that figuring out how to open the case in the first place was somewhat akin to opening the hellraiser puzzlebox.

it’s pretty much outlived its usefulness but not by much. it was only a 33MHz machine, but the <a href=”http://www.occam.com/images/pics/NS3.jpg” title=”screenshot”>OpenStep GUI</a> felt snappier and more responsive than windows or OS X does on hardware 100 times faster.