Hello, I am SadEagle, nice to meet you.
Fri, 11 Jun 2004 13:38 -0400

First of all, let me introduce myself: I am SadEagle, aka Maks. I maintain some of the styles --- mostly Keramik and the pixmap engine, and do random fixes to Light 2 and 3. Although, if Clee does not stop playing with PlanetKDE to go fix some of the dotNET bugs, I may have to go fix some things in there too. Yes, that's a threat. I also do random bugfixing. I used to do some performance tuning, but didn't do that for a bit, since I seem to be less patient these days. Oh, and there is a non-trivial probability that I've marked a bug you've filed as a DUPLICATE, or occasionally INVALID, so I am annoying like that. I have been also known to use the FIXED resolution, however, so that sort of makes it up a bit.

Now, this is the first actual post on my blog. Since I don't have/don't want access to any machine capable of running web server scripts, I decided to do my blog using good old-fashioned static HTML. I am certainly too lazy to synchronize RSS and HTML by hand, so I wrote a collection of Ruby scripts to do that for me, and to automate some of the other work, like creating entry pages, summary pages, linking them together, etc.. What I ended up with turned out highly useful, but somewhat inelegant, due to the multiple conversions between different formats. It works roughly like this:

  1. I write a webpage in HTML, with the title on the first line
  2. Run the addentry.rb script. It escapes out the special characters into entities, adds the pubDate, and wraps the title as <title>, content as <description>. The result is given a number identifier, and put into the entries/ dir
  3. Run generate.rb. This collects all the entries in entries/, calculates which HTML pages are needed, gives the entries their locations, and builds the full RSS feed, as fell as temporary fragments. Each one is fed into rss2HTML.rb to build webpages
  4. Synchronize to the server using SSH
So it starts with HTML, turns into RSS incrementally, and then produces different HTML. Not the most direct way of doing things. But then, it does not need a database, administration, etc, and is easily hackable. Which is a good thing, should I ever move away from the east-coast, since it only knows about EDT and EST timezones right now. And, of course the look greatly suffers from being the output of my graphic design "skills". I should probably stick to coding.
Fri, 11 Jun 2004 13:38 -0400
Hello, I am SadEagle, nice to meet you.
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