Personal Musings for Public Consumption

I just threw in a few snippets of code to handle the useful "updated" feature.  If I post a blurb of content, and revise the post, I do want to bump the content to the front of the line as a new post, but don't want to move the date that the news blurb was published.  Also added a privacy level so that I can write crap and shield it from the world's virgin eyes.  Paragraphs that I deem required content for the front page are also now included when generating the front page index, which is important so that I can remove the two <br/> tags between the content of my Squirrel post and the video of the catapult, while still ensuring that the video makes it onto the front page.  Lastly, I've also added the ability to pre-write a story and not have it publish until such time as the news is ready to break.  Hardly original features, but consider that all of this has been done without aid of a turing complete programming language (sh may arguably be turing complete, but I don't want to lump it into that category) and in probably 4hrs of work.  Keen.  I can now collect more Squirrel Catapult related content, write up some snarky bit of dribble that I find amusing, and then suddenly reveal its existence to the world without lifting a finger.  Super keenness has been achieved.

I may take this collection of scripts and crap and make it open source.  I think I want to add content filtering before I release this into the world, however.  Wouldn't it be nice to have foo(N) references automatically link to a man page wiki style, and for the seven dirty words to go from shit to sh#%?  Hrm...  fuck it, content filtering will be done by sed.  You script kiddy n00bs need to get a grip on reality and do something useful with your fingers.  Triple holy crap!  All of this done and it's not even 9am (ie, I haven't finished my coffee yet).  Win.

Updated 2007-11-20T15:50:00-08:00: Well shit, wouldn't you know it.  Neither OS-X nor my hosting provider have current versions of xmllint or xsltproc.  `sudo port install libxml2` and `./configure --prefix=$HOME/local/xml` to the rescue (after cleansing libtool(1)/bash(1) unholiness), but damn it what a pain in the ass.  Without dyn:map(), I'm not sure XSL would be usable: it certainly makes sorting dates harder (read: only way to sort dates without using a recursive template function).

Updated 2007-11-21T13:40:00-08:00: Crap.  My change to ISO datetimes broke my future proofing bits.  I posted a video for later this afternoon and found that I had all kinds of busted logic because of that.  Fix the build system and all previous dependencies on dates.  Kinda gnarly, but now counts are correct in not including future or hidden posts.  exslt standards committee, an XSLT date comparison operator would be really nice.  Thanks.  In the mean time, cron has been activated.

Tools used are limited to xmllint*, xsltproc*, make(1), and sh(1). make(1) calls xsltproc*, which generates a temp shell script which turns around and generates the various pages of content using xsltproc* with different sets of stylesheets. Grotesque? Yup. Clean? Very, actually. I dare say, elegant even.