2005 Archive

Feature: No More Free BitKeeper:
Linus, not interested in a one sided deal even when he’s on the winning side, decided for this and other reasons to migrate away from BitKeeper and to begin looking for an alternative.

It will be interesting to see how this works out.

Making xaraya react to the mt_keywords MT member was easy with the existing keywords module. The harder part (read: more time consuming) was to make the visual presentation of them in the site somewhat acceptable.

If you view this article by itself (what we call the display view in Xaraya), you’ll notice an extra part on the right side “Related entries” which lists other entries which have the same keywords attached to them. This allows a reader to quickly read all entries which have the same or similar taxonomy. The block isnt fully functional yet, because it reacts to some keywords while it doesn’t for others, so there’s still some digging to do there. (FIXED)

Outstanding task list:

• making Xaraya react on the mt_tb_ping_urls member
• deal with the allow/disallow flags for trackback and comments
• find a home for mt_excerpt
• implement the mt.supportedTextFilters method to allow for markdown or textile input

I dropped a quick message to Adriaan Tijsseling, the developer of the amazing Ecto package with a number of questions. One of the questions was whether Xaraya could be included as an endpoint in the accounts screen.

This morning, I fired up Ecto, and the update which contained it was already there! Man, this guy is quick.

Awesome!

While I was at it, the Moveable Type API seemed quite close, so I created a little module to start implementing it.

The more advanced features of the MT API I havent implemented (yet), but one thing is supported from the beginning, which is the Extended Entry.

Continuing the work on the metaweblog api implementation in Xaraya, i just finished an initial implementation of the newMediaObject method the API.

This allows (from capable clients) to upload files to Xaraya directly from the blogging client program.

Like this:

Brought back the metaweblog api module and activated it on this blog.

The metaweblog api in Xaraya is incomplete, but the first result is there: multiple category support, directly from the blog client. (This post is in two for example)

I moved over my Moveable Type powered blog over to a Xaraya install. Long overdue, given that I am a developer on Xaraya, it is sort of obligatory to run the blog from that package.

I tried to mimick the old look as much as possible. While Xaraya is certainly more flexible and some things were much easier to do than in MT, I also noticed that the finesses of MT will take a while to move over.
Some things which will take some time to come back the full MT way:

• Trackback functionaliy; while Xaraya supports this, it will take some manual effort to get it to be a friendly player;
• Inline RDF Moveable type supports by default for autodiscovery;
• Some templating work is still left (like directly showing the older entries).
• The support for uploading images directly with blog postings
• The extended API support

The above is one of the reasons i moved over, so i have a real life itch to implement those things in Xaraya. We’ll see