The Lurker

My Lurker to-do list

posted by ajf on 2002-12-19 at 03:33 am

In the past week or so, I've thought of a few things that I'd like to implement for my blog, in no particular order:

Search. My web host has gcj installed, so I'm fairly confident that I will be able to use Lucene. Of course, this means Lurk (which is what I call the code when I'm trying not to confuse myself) will be written in three very different languages (PHP, Python, and now Java), which is just ugly.
HTML validation. Every time I post a link with an ampersand in it, I forget to escape it. I'll probably change the posting interface quite a bit. If I'm parsing HTML, I can implement a few interesting new features, like recognising links to other blog entries and adding its title to the link's title attribute. And, as I've been reminded, I did say other people were going to be able to post here; cleaning up the posting interface and HTML validation are the two things I want to do before that happens.
Better RSS. I still think content:encoded is stupid, but I don't know if there is a saner way to include the content of a blog entry in RSS which is actually supported by any RSS readers. I might throw in support for RSS 2.0 as well, and use content negotiation to choose between it and the existing RSS 1.0 format.
Pingback. I'm still not sure whether or not I want to support comment posting here, but allowing other blog writers to tell me when they've responded to my blog is a comfortable middle ground. There's a simple XML-RPC client/server implementation written in PHP which should help. Writing the pingback client (so my blog entries send out pingbacks to blogs when I link to them) is a bit more work. And then there's Trackback; Kevin uses Movable Type, the origin of Trackback, and I don't know if MT supports Pingback. Trackback looks like considerably more work for me if I want to send trackbacks, but it's probably fairly easy to implement the other way. Most likely this uncertainty means I won't do anything. :-)

In other news, I've definitely decided I'm going to buy a DVD burner to replace the dead CD burner, and I need a new keyboard too, because sometimes when I want "." I get "", and other times I get "..", and if I'm really, really lucky, I get ".".