Nullblog: Test Blog.

I have managed to get myself a real job now, so unfortunately, nullblog has been put on the backburner somewhat, however I am still build chunks of it when I get the chance. I currently have a working comment system and login form, which will eventually evolve into a full fledged web interface, thus making nullblog a bit more accessable to the average web nerd. I am also planning on using span tags and unique css classes so developing styles and shells for nullblog will be a lot easier. Here's to the future. Thanks again for you patience.

Just checking in. I haven't started work on the next version of nullblog yet, but it's in the works. I will probably sit down and start working on it more seriously in May when i'm done with this semester. Thanks for your patience.

The TagStandard project is well underway now. The document parser is now complete in addition to a web updater for the tagstandard.xml file, so when run, it downloads data from TagStandard's wiki xml document, checks to see which ones you have locally, and then if you're missing tags from the version online, it will append them automagically. With the beginning steps of TagStandard out of the way, I am now able to continue work on Nullblog. My next steps will be to impliment the TagStandard parser into Nullblog so the two work seamlessly together. I'm also thinking I might allow user options in the form of an XML file, so that people using Nullblog will not have to root through Perl code in order to change settings. It will also allow users to keep their options the same through updates. In addition to this, I have plans to introduce a revert/restore feature which will still a backup of the previous update on the server, and if reverted, will simply delete the newer file and restore the old one. This will help somewhat when it comes to accidental deletion of local files, or deleting most recent entries. Admittedly, the system is still rudimentary, but I am sticking to my original goal of simplicity and hackability, so that Nullblog will be useful in many different settings. Version 0.2 might take a little while longer to get out, but it's on it's way. Bear with me, my brain is still somewhat fried from thinking in almost nothing, but Perl for the past week. :)

As I mentioned briefly in the last post, i've started a collaboration with my friend Michael Adams to work on a project to make online [tags] open and standard. We're not referring to tags as in the tags you find in the bottom of a blog to link types of posts, but rather the type of tags used within online content for quick linking, such as livejournal's <lj user="..."> tag or mediawiki's [...] style of tagging. We propose the use of an xml file containing tag items and their properties which can then be used across the board on many applications and even on multiple applications on a single machine, with a simple redirect to the location of the tagstandard.xml file. That way, when you got to update your blog for example, rather than typing out an entire link to a wikipedia entry, you'd only need to type [wiki:something interesting] and if all goes well, it should be automatically linked to the article you tell it to. I am in the process of working on a tag parser written in perl which will scan a document for tags and when it find them, refer to the xml document's tag="..." function and compare them with the ones it finds, and then substitute in the given variables. At this point, I feel it's about 50-60% complete, but i'm probably being hopeful.

As you can see, this project is well underway, but here are some things that are in the works for future versions: permalink anchors for each post generated by date/time, ability to upload from a textfile rather than stdin, and implimentation of a collaborative project i'm involved with, tagstandard, which will allow for wiki like tags to be parsed and then converted to links specified in a local xml file. The tagstandard project is in the baby steps right now, but you can read more about it here link. I'll be writing more about Nullblog and related projects right here to demonstrate it's usefulness, and also to point out it's weakpoints in my own mind so I am better able to fix them.

It appears that Nullblog is officially a success. This customized page was made by doing a server side include to the true blog located in ./data and then using css adjustments to change colors, div layers to add the side bar, etc, etc and this is just a very simple layout. Much more can be done with it than this i'm sure. Keep in mind that this is still only version 0.1 so there are a lot of improvements to be made, but for right now, it's fully functional and I hope someone out there finds it useful. :) Contact me if you have any questions. Have fun and happy hacking.

This is just a first post to test my new software, Nullblog, available for download here - http://www.photophobic.net/technology. Right now I'm starting to test and see how much I can customize it's interface just using a server side include and some css adjustments. Let's see how it goes.