Curiouser and Curiouser! on squib

Curiouser and Curiouser on Rails!

Fri, 18 Nov 2005 00:45:47 +0000

Okay the weblog is back in action, no longer being published using Radio but now using Squib which is my new open source weblog tool. It's heavily influenced by my 3 years of using Radio: like Radio, Squib is an application that runs on your computer and publishes a weblog to a remote server as a static set of pages (it talks to the Radio Community Server using the RCS upstreaming protocol). Unlike Radio, Squib is written in pure Ruby using the Rails framework and currently clocks in at around 1,000 lines total.

Right now it's in pretty rough shape and probably only usable by someone desparate to escape Radio (let's say maybe your copy of Radio kept upstreaming 0-length files) but wanting to keep compatibility with an existing Radio weblog (same permalinks, etc...)

Over the next couple of weeks I aim to fix the gaping holes. Source should be available from RubyForge any day now.

Squib keeps wriggling

Fri, 02 Dec 2005 09:25:02 +0000

So, as usual, it's a huge amount more work than I expected but Squib is finally getting to it's feet. In that regard I am highly indebted to Messrs Kirks and Fragen who have been testing the software and finding innumerable bugs, problems, and unexpected behaviours: beginning with the INSTALL instructions and proceeding from there ;-)

I had been expecting to release the software last weekend but Steve's experience showed me it was too early. There is a remote possibility of a release this weekend, but I won't do it until the installation process is a little smoother. Locomotive appears to show promise in this respect. Anyone interested in how we're doing is welcome to come chat in #squib (Freenode IRC).

Squib becomes real

Tue, 13 Dec 2005 11:03:39 +0000

I've started quite a lot of development projects in my time and many (most?) of them never made it very far. When I set out to replace Radio as my blogging tool I knew, at the back of my mind, there was a chance this would be one of those projects. So it is with a great deal of pleasure that I announce the release of Squib 0.3.0 which, if it cannot be said to be perfect, is at least usable on a day to day basis.

When I started I had a view that this was going to be a one user show. My goals were quirky enough that I didn't think anyone else would be interested in Yet Another Blogging Application. I'm grateful to be wrong as Steve Kirks and Andy Fragen have been invaluable in helping me to test, fix, and document Squib.

At this point in it's development Squib is most likely to be interesting to adventurous users who want to jump ship from Radio Userland and take their weblog with them. Squib can import Radio weblogs directly and supports publishing to Radio Community Server, FTP, and SFTP servers. One major caveat is that it doesn't (and may never) support categories although it almost certain will support multiple weblogs in the next version.

Squib has a new homepage and a future

Fri, 30 Dec 2005 18:15:57 +0000

I spent a little time today creating a proper home page for Squib. Since the project is now quite real it was time to get rid of the, frankly, horrible place holder and put the project on a firmer footing.

So the new page explains the goal of the project and makes the license (MIT) clear, describes the features better (both for the current release and hinting at a roadmap), and outlines how interested parties can get invovled with the development. I'd really like someone to tackle the user interface from the ground up.

I'm shooting for the 0.4 release being sometime mid January and that will include, among many improvements, support for publishing multiple weblogs. At that point I will be able to publish a weblog for the Squib project itself. I could do it now with two instances of Squib but that proved to be a PITA.

The 0.5 release will include the new aggregator that I was working on last year but never got around to releasing, MetaWeblog API support that I will borrow from Typo, and a plug-in system. The ETA for all of this is March sometime.

From 0.5 onwards I expect it to be mainly bugfixes, improved usability, and better tagging support all the way to 1.0!

Hunting for Squib

Thu, 05 Jan 2006 13:08:35 +0000

I just committed some changes that Andy sent me last night that update the Fragen3.14 theme for Squib. I've switched Curiouser and Curiouser! to use Andy's theme and I think it looks pretty spiffy. Something else that's spiffy is the way the sidebar is now completely dynamic -- driven by a simple YAML which aggregates chunks of user written HTML, OPML, Textile, or Markdown content. This means the user can re-structure and add to the sidebar content without having to change the theme at all.

We're making pretty good progress towards the 0.4 release in all areas but one: Multiple Weblog Support. I need this right now but I'm struggling to get it done because it's a pretty major change (curse me for not anticipating this requirement when I started Squib). Worse yet I will have to merge it with the huge number of improvements that we've made since I branched. Subversion makes this possible without going insane, but it's still not pretty.

After that though it should be plain sailing to the 0.4 release and I feel like I'm still on track for mid-January. I've also dusted off the MemeScope aggregator code I was messing with last year. It's almost unrecognizable now (being written for the, now ancient history, Rails 0.11 and on Windows no less!) but it should be reasonably easy to get it working again.

In 0.5 I want to merge the aggregator into Squib. Again, this is something I really want. Blogging for me was never the same after I stopped using Radio's River of News aggregator. Although the aggregator was basic and faulty the model was just right. Nothing has replaced my ability to see a post in my aggregator, click a button marked Post, and have it neatly formatted as a new entry ready to blog about. I want that back and Squib 0.5 will give it to me.

0.5 will also see MetaWeblog API support (courtesy of code from Typo) and some other neat bits and pieces. 0.5 will be good.

So good progress being made to 0.4 and an exciting roadmap for 0.5! Now I just have to find time to do it!

Thanks are due

Sat, 14 Jan 2006 16:46:46 +0000

Well I have a nice new weblog really. The last vestiges of the old site are now pretty much abandoned. First I have a lovely new banner graphic that my friend bethlet has created from a photo she took while we were out having cocktails last year and Andy was able to quickly modify Squibs Fragen3.14 theme to support banner images. I wrote Squib and even I am impressed at how easy that was!

In other changes Andy and I have done a round of SEO optimisation and our sites now get pretty good ratings using an SEO analyzer and, for the first time, my site (the homepage at least) is XHTML trans compliant. I'm not sure how useful that is but it's satisfying none the less.

So, my grateful thanks go to Bethlet and Andy for their hard work! I'm really pleased with how it's turned out :-)

You don't have to be Microsoft, but it helps

Fri, 31 Mar 2006 22:57:26 +0100

The last release of Squib was in December 2005. At that point I boldly predicted a new release in January with all sorts of interesting new features. Hrm... life never works out quite how you expect.

For one thing my job has hotted up big time since the new year, for another I've moved house, and, perhaps most importantly of all, the expedient hacks I made when I first wrote Squib came home to roost.

To get back on track I tossed out multiple weblog support which proved to be harder to retrofit than I'd imagined and a few other bits and pieces got kicked back to 0.5. However this has left room for numerous smaller improvements that make the day-to-day experience much nicer and with the recent fixes to publishing in place I'm almost ready to kick the 0.4 release out the door!

So, nearly 3 months late and minus the showboat features that were promised in December. I'm codenaming this release Vista.

Combining OPML and RSS to create an export format for a blog

Mon, 10 Apr 2006 09:30:46 +0100

Marc Canter links to Joe Brockmeier's post about weblogs having a shared format. Timely.

I've been thinking about this myself because I want such a format too. Although I have written a tool to serve my own needs I won't be using it forever and I (probably) want to take my blog with me. I've also been thinking about how to do backup and restore. The two problems appear to be the same to me.

I think we already have the answer: RSS. It's already a natural format for holding the essential data of a weblog and namespacing is an easy way to store the tool-specific data. A tool that understands another tools metadata (e.g. ENT topics) can import it, a tool that cannot can safely ignore it. Actually why are we even discussing this?

The real question seems to me to be: how best to use RSS for this purpose? Do we have one gigantic RSS feed for a weblog? In my case with about 2100 posts it would be pretty big and unwieldy. Back in 2004 Paolo and I were talking about how to do weblog archives.

I was messing with an approach that combined RSS and OPML to create a weblog archive. For each post/day/month (pick your granularity) create a corresponding RSS feed of weblog entries. These feeds are then referenced from an OPML file that defines the overall structure of the archived weblog. In this way you can quickly narrow down to find an individual post, or suck up the whole thing (useful for tools like Sigmund).

For convenience the whole lot could be wrapped up in a .tar.gz. It might be helpful to include some kind of (optional?) metadata file at the top-level that describes the contents (ala JAR archives).

I'm not sure why I stopped working on that, maybe it just got shoved aside by other things. I might have a go at adding this feature to Squib since we need a backup format anyway.

An experimental OPML+RSS archive for C&C

Wed, 12 Apr 2006 19:48:29 +0100

Over the last couple of days I've hacked together experimental support for OPML+RSS archives in Squib as I described a couple of days ago. You can grab my entire archive from here either directly or as a .tar.gz archive.

The structure of the archive looks like this:

The weblog.opml file is an outline that contains the date-based structure of Curiouser and Curiouser. There is a branch for each year, and each month of each year. At the leaves are pointers to daily RSS files and the ID & title of entries.

It occurred to me that I could just put the entire entry data directly into the OPML file and cut out the RSS. However, with over 2,100 entries, I felt that would lead to a very big and unwieldy file. Being just a file of pointers means it can still be sensibly opened in an OPML editor.

Another reason for using RSS is to ensure that users of the archive can take advantage of all the software out there to parse RSS. Once you've figured out which days entries you want, you can hand the corresponding RSS file to a standard parser and get back the entries.

Update: I've added <link rel="archive" type="application/opml+xml" href=".../archive/data/weblog.opml" /> to my home page to allow archive auto-discovery. I did a minimum amount of research before doing this so please correct me if that's a gross misuse of a link tag or there is some established way of doing this already.