No entries for several months... Why? Maybe I just lost the urge.. or maybe there is something more.
I am a person who is keen on structure. Not everything I do it totally structured, but where structure exists I like to find and make use of it. The thing about a blog is it is largely unstructured. It it just a time-ordered series of thoughts. I think that is great, but I would like there to be extra structure as well.
Sometimes different blog entries at different times are connected by a theme. That connection should be made apparent somehow. But this blog doesn't let me.
So I tried creating sub-blogs (look over on the right hand side) but there didn't really get anywhere.
So where next?
I think I want to just have a single blog where each entry can be tagged with a topic, or topics. i.e. just a list of words.
All those topics then appear in the right hand column as a concept index. The list would be initially unordered, but I would like to be able to sort it and even create classifications (e.g. "raid" implies "linux". Then everything which implies "linux" are sorted together).
Then the structure would just grow as I have thoughts to record.
Each entry would naturally have links named for each tag, and these would link to a list of entries with that tag.
Still wnating stucture, I think I would like to be able to flag articles as being some sore of summary for a topic, so they always appear at the top of a listing of articles in that topic.
So: here is the structure.
Ever entry in the site is simply an article. Every article has a name based on create-date which is used for sorting. Every article should also have a list of keywords and a title (among other bits).
For each keyword, we keep a file listing the articles with that key word. This is in reverse chronological order so we only need to read the first few entries to display a blog.
All keywords are listed in a file which contains indenting for grouping and implications. From this is the right hand column created.
New keywords are automatically appended to this file, which can be edited like anything else.
It might be nice to also cause any update to be recorded in a per-day file and these become mini articles in the main blog.
It might be good to be able to hide somethings from the main blog (just for completeness, I don't have anything to hide).
comments?
I'd also like to consider allowing comments to this blog (Yes, I know lots of pre-existing blogs support comments, and why reinvent the wheel. The thing is that I understand something much better if I have implemented it myself. And after all, we are the Knights who say NIH (Not Invented Here)).
I wouldn't want a login database or similar. At best we might send back a cookie containing name/prefs so they wouldn't have to typed every time a visitor comments.
Comments are like a sub-blog. But they can only be saved once. I guess they get file names line entryname.sequencenumber. The next seq number is stored in entryname.cmnt. The sequence number is assigned when the comment gets saved. Comments only appear when viewing the actual article.
TODO
So: What needs to actually be done?
1/ When a page is saved, strip keywords, add page name to all keyword files, add new keywords to keywords file. Follow any keyword implications and add page name to those keywords to.
2/ Change the blog producer to read the relevant keyword file to produce a list
3/ When a 'keyword' is requested by URL, auto-generate a blog displaying entries for just that keyword. This needs to use the default layout somehow.
4/ Add link to create a comment. This must like creating any entry but as the password is missing, only a comment can be created.
5/ Write comment storing code to allocate new seqnum
6/ blog display code to report number of comments
7/ entry display code to report all comments.
8/ "draft" keyword to exclude from main page.