WOULD YOU CARE FOR SOME TEA?
Sunday, July 22
The Wonders Of Modern Technology
So it turns out I can make arbitrary transparency effects on the fly. That'll come in handy; it's a whole bunch less static images I need, and a whole lot more flexibility.
Only works for rectangles so far. Let's see what I can do with shapes...
So it turns out I can make arbitrary transparency effects on the fly. That'll come in handy; it's a whole bunch less static images I need, and a whole lot more flexibility.
Only works for rectangles so far. Let's see what I can do with shapes...
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
04:52 PM
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Post contains 51 words, total size 1 kb.
Feeling Good 'Bout My Irregularity
I happened to stumble across the source code for an ASP-based open-source blogging app while I was looking for something else entirely* and I was struck by how regular and elegant the code was.
The code for Minx doesn't look like that. Partly because I developed it relatively quickly and it's still on version 1. But mostly, I realised a bit later, for another reason; for the same reason that the uncompressed source code for the entire system will still fit on a 360K floppy: I've squeezed all the regularity out.
A lot of the regularity in the code I was looking at was sequences of assignment statements - in Minx these are rolled up into loops, driven by tables. I wrote my own SQL abstraction module for this reason. It doesn't abstract the queries for me, but it completely abstracts the data.
I still want to prettify my code, but I feel happier now.
Also, while I was asleep I thought of a straightforward way to handle per-user/per-site customisation. That will address a lot of limitations of working with a hosted system rather than your own custom app; it will allow per-user themes for blogs, for example. I'll try to fit that in this coming week, along with the theme builder, site wizards, and AJAXulation.
* An open source web-based code display thingy**; turns out that SyntaxHighlighter is now LGPL and will do just fine.
** For an enhanced version of the [code] tag.
I happened to stumble across the source code for an ASP-based open-source blogging app while I was looking for something else entirely* and I was struck by how regular and elegant the code was.
The code for Minx doesn't look like that. Partly because I developed it relatively quickly and it's still on version 1. But mostly, I realised a bit later, for another reason; for the same reason that the uncompressed source code for the entire system will still fit on a 360K floppy: I've squeezed all the regularity out.
A lot of the regularity in the code I was looking at was sequences of assignment statements - in Minx these are rolled up into loops, driven by tables. I wrote my own SQL abstraction module for this reason. It doesn't abstract the queries for me, but it completely abstracts the data.
I still want to prettify my code, but I feel happier now.
Also, while I was asleep I thought of a straightforward way to handle per-user/per-site customisation. That will address a lot of limitations of working with a hosted system rather than your own custom app; it will allow per-user themes for blogs, for example. I'll try to fit that in this coming week, along with the theme builder, site wizards, and AJAXulation.
* An open source web-based code display thingy**; turns out that SyntaxHighlighter is now LGPL and will do just fine.
** For an enhanced version of the [code] tag.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
05:04 AM
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Post contains 248 words, total size 2 kb.
Saturday, July 14
Will It Blend?
Sure it will!
You can now import Blogspot and Movable Type blogs* in Thai, Vietnamese, Turkish, Greek and Hebrew** into Minx. Or at least, I can; you'll get the opportunity tomorrow.
Does it work? If have no freaking idea. I've put a wrapper around a standard set of character set codecs to convert your file into Unicode, which gets stored and served as UTF-8. But I don't have any sample blogs in Ukrainian or Korean to try it out with, and I wouldn't necessarily pick up the errors if I did.
It looks interesting if you tell it your file is in Arabic when it's really Windows-1252, though.
I also discovered that Minx wasn't necessarily serving up UTF-8 when it said it was. I'm going to fix that tomorrow as well; it shouldn't affect anything because the back-end really is entirely Unicode, but Steven, if your Japanese examples suddenly turn into randomly accented Latin text, that's why.
* And blogs from anything else that can produce a Blogger/MT-style export file.
** And normal-type languages, too.***
*** Also automatically handles gzip and bzip2!
Sure it will!
You can now import Blogspot and Movable Type blogs* in Thai, Vietnamese, Turkish, Greek and Hebrew** into Minx. Or at least, I can; you'll get the opportunity tomorrow.
Does it work? If have no freaking idea. I've put a wrapper around a standard set of character set codecs to convert your file into Unicode, which gets stored and served as UTF-8. But I don't have any sample blogs in Ukrainian or Korean to try it out with, and I wouldn't necessarily pick up the errors if I did.
It looks interesting if you tell it your file is in Arabic when it's really Windows-1252, though.
I also discovered that Minx wasn't necessarily serving up UTF-8 when it said it was. I'm going to fix that tomorrow as well; it shouldn't affect anything because the back-end really is entirely Unicode, but Steven, if your Japanese examples suddenly turn into randomly accented Latin text, that's why.
* And blogs from anything else that can produce a Blogger/MT-style export file.
** And normal-type languages, too.***
*** Also automatically handles gzip and bzip2!
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
07:51 PM
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