The Lurker

Lurker Features

posted by ajf on 2002-06-13 at 08:42 pm

So I wrote this code last night, and now I can easily add new content to my web site.

Easily? I have to ssh to the web server, open a text file, type in a bunch of rubbish like @title Lurker Features, type date +%s to find out the 10-digit Unix timestamp for the current time so I can copy that into another cryptic line at the top of the file, open up another file, add a line containing the name of the previous file, update its timestamp, and hope for the best. And when I get enough entries in here, I'll want to delete some from the bottom of this "recent entries file", which means I'll need some other way to get to them.

Obviously, I'm going to have to add a few more features.

Lots of these features are already present in things like Wikiwiki. In fact it was the simple plain-text based formatting rules that Wikis use that finally inspired me to get off my arse and write this code (having previously been put off by the ickyness of writing XML stuff in PHP and Python). I considered just installing Wikiwiki or one of its many clones, but I had a few features ideas that I was too lazy to look for in a Wiki. (That's a really bad reason.)

Friendly web-based content insertion
Caching (so the poor web server doesn't have to read and interpret all those files every time somebody loads the web page)
Versioning. Not only do I want to be able to edit content items, I want to be able to view the history of changes.
I should probably display those keywords I'm typing in the top of my content items.
Search
Fix list items so they don't have to appear all on one line. This list is a bit awkward to edit.