Wednesday, October 4

ware

Open question: What would it take to make the crude, ad hoc p1k3 backend into a generalized package which someone might conceivably download, install, and configure in a few relatively painless steps?

Offhand, I think a rough first release would require the following things:

• Integration of the Atom feed into the main Perl script.
• Improved navigation of entries: An option to display unobtrusive 'next', 'previous', and 'up' links, plus some link tags in the header for the browsers that pay attention to that stuff.
• Improved navigation between the wiki and weblog namespaces.
• Easy configuration of all the important site-specific options.
• An upgrade path non-destructive of existing configurations.
• Documentation.

After that, the things that would make it really usable would be:

• Inclusion of a web-based editor and file manager for weblog fragments, with quick shortcuts for creating the right files.
• Use of arbitrary markup (such as that provided by the wiki, or plugins like Textile) for entries, instead of raw HTML.
• ...or a way to specify flavors of output, so that the script could gracefully produce (for most entry fragments) Atom, or plaintext, or PDF output by way of TeX.
• Tighter overall integration with the wiki.
• Adapting the wiki (likely to still be Wala.pm) to cope with edit collisions, and to use a little smarter markup, and possibly to use a linking convention that bugs me less than CamelCase.
• Thinking seriously about whether there's a better way than date-based organization of fragments.

'cause, you know, the world needs more blogging software.

p1k3 / 2006 / 10 / 4
tags: topics/perl, topics/technical, topics/wrt