Tech Note: New Blogging System

Whew.

I’ve finally got this weblog converted over to a new blogging system, something a little bit fancier than the old Perl-and-baling-wire script I had rigged up before. (If you’re curious, I now store my booklog in XML format, and have a Java app that uses XSLT to publish new entries.)

This matters not at all to you, of course. But what may matter to you is that I now have permalinks! Exciting! Thrilling! Okay, not so much. Other than that (and some mostly invisible marking and scripting clean up), not much is new around here. The nice thing, though, is that now when I want to change something, I can just do it, instead of having to manually go back and update every single old entry to reflect the change. And I can auto-generate an index by author, which I suspect I’ll do as soon as I recover from this effort.

The things I do for you people. Let me know if anything looks broken.

Comments

Mike on January 30, 2003:

For those who care about the technical details (which I expect to be essentially none of you), I’ve updated the “About Weasel Words” section on the Links page to explain exactly how things work now.

Trent on January 30, 2003:

This is all really cool (no, seriously), and I bow down before your programming manliness, but… is there a reason your “Comments” links no longer list the number of comments attached to a given post? Believe it or not, I actually use those to decide whether to check up on a comments thread or not.

Mike on January 30, 2003:

Trent: What browser are you using? I changed my JavaScript so that instead of being hackish, it actually uses the DOM to display comment counts. This makes the code more standard on modern browsers, but won’t work on old browsers. It should work fine on IE5+, Mozilla 1.0+, Safari, Konqueror, and Opera 7.

Trent on January 31, 2003:

Ahh. That must be it; I’m using Opera 6.01 as my default. Upgrade? Who, me?

Trent on January 31, 2003:

Okay, they work in Opera 7, although now I have to retweak all my preferences. Damn you, making me get with the march of progress and all…

Sorry to clog your comments with all the meta-level navel-gazing, btw.

Mike on January 31, 2003:

Think nothing of it, old bean.

I was actually surprised that Opera has taken so long to get with the times — I’d always had an impression of it as a standards-compliant browser. But as I went trawling around to find what I could find, it appears that Opera is actually notorious for its flaky standards support. Weird.

At any rate, I’m amused as all get out that you upgraded your browser so you could see the comment counts on my booklog. Heh.