Silver's Simple Site - Weblog - Tags - Weblog

The world is at an end, I have a weblog. Things can only go downhill from here...

Aaaah, a web-based posting system always feels so much better. Next stop, web-based editing...

Edit Ok, so the preview form is screwing up the <textarea>. *sigh*

For those wondering, yes, commenting will be added to this weblog at some point. Not sure when, depends how much work I want to do... but it shouldn't be too hard.

Ah, that was a fun exercise indeed. I've now got an RSS feed of the last 10 posts, which your browser should pick up automatically.

This is a test weblog post which I will be using for testing some new features on over the next few days. Please don't be alarmed if new features appear here first!

I've noticed a few bugs and general issues with my weblog software today, so I'll just write it down so you know and I don't forget to fix it on Friday or at the weekend.

• RSS feed for comments is needed (both for each post, and globally).
• RSS feed for tag list, and for posts in each tag needed.
• RSS feed for each date grouping allowed, maybe.
• If you preview a comment post for a second time, the URL gains an extra "/", which messes up the stylesheet loading and the page title.
• Link to next month is broken when next month is December (the page title is right, but it is using month 00, instead of 12).
• Link to next/previous month doesn't change year if wrapping is involved.

I've gone through and fixed all but one of the items listed previously. The only item remaining is the RSS for tags and the tag listing itself.

If you find anything is not working, please do comment, and I'll fix it. Please note that the comments feed is not linked from anywhere, as it is only useful for me monitoring new comments.

Well, I finally got around to nuking that annoying ".pl" in the weblog's URLs - all the URLs should now not include it. Naturally, I've put a redirect from weblog.pl to weblog, so no links should break.

It took quite a bit of thinking, but it works - not showing file extensions is not one of IIS' strong points, however, it has more than enough power to do it if you know what you're doing. :-)

Please comment here if you find any bugs or other issues with this change, or indeed any part of the weblog system.

It's nice to see a good bit of collaboration over something as visually important to users as icons. Since this is all good for the user, Feed Icons has sprung up to help everyone follow suit, and so my weblog now has those funky little orange icons in the top-right corner of every page with a feed.

I am currently in the progress of implementing the necessary features and components in my weblog software to allow the use of a standalone client to post entries (and ultimately edit, as well). As I'm already beta testing a bunch of other Live tools, I thought I'd start with Windows Live Writer.

The current beta version supports:

• WordPress.com
• Blogger
• TypePad
• LiveJournal
• Movable Type
• WordPress (inc. 2.2+)
• Community Server
• dasBlog
• Radio Userland

Additionally, it supports two raw APIs on anything that implements them:

• Metaweblog API
• Movable Type API

Not bad. So, I've chosen the Movable Type API for mine, but I'm jumping ahead - there's something else, something really cool, that I should mention.

Really Simple Discovery, RSD, is a method by which a tool can identify information about a page and its supported editing schemes. Including a link in the main weblog page with rel="EditURI" to point to the RSD file (which is XML), and that indicates which editing APIs are supported and their respective URIs.

Windows Live Writer checks for and uses the RSD information, which results in a 3-entry configuration: weblog URL, username and password. It doesn't get much simpler than that.

Still to come: the Movable Type API, Blogger, categories and more.