draft0 - a shared blog by just some people

I know, my entries on SBWG are too chaotic to follow what's happening with the project in detail. But who cares, really? I'll just continue to write broadly about the progress that I make with the script.

So, after re-deciding that I'm not going to make a version 1.0 because it's just not the kind of software that can ever claim for itself the thoroughness that I myself would expect from a piece of software that's labeled v1.0, I finished the testing and bug squashing that I, for a short while, had intended to lead to version 1.0 to my satisfaction, and started implementing new features again. Great, now I can make the script take longer to finish again. :)

During my testing and bug squashing spree I already implemented a routine that I call the pathreducer. If enabled through command line option, it reduces paths to conform with the file and directory name restrictions of most file systems out there. I took this a bit far and it can now even conform to filenames of the 6.3 format, if the user wishes. I have ideas to improve this further, including making it automatically conform to the exact limitations of individual file systems instead of stripping and replacing characters that aren't allowed in file names in many file systems whether it would have been necessary in the present case or not. But that's for another time. For now it works well for what it is supposed to be: a workaround for too long and otherwise invalid file names that would be generated by the script when naming files after categories, topics and other tags, as well as a solution to problems that might occur if SBWG would be used to generate a web site onto a file system that has more restrictions than those commonly used on Unix-like systems.

As part of the improvements made during the no-new-feature time, I fixed many bugs that I didn't expect at all when I started (which is why I prohibited myself from implementing new features in the first place), learned a lot about Bash again, and made some small improvements that I wouldn't call new features, but are still neat to have. One of them makes tag lines more intuitive. Forbidden characters are removed or replaced and leading and trailing whitespaces are removed, leading coincidentally to the fact that you can use a space after the tag type (e.g. 'cat: Example' instead of 'cat:Example') or not and the tag will be recognised as being identical in both cases. I'm mentioning this because the first person to type a SBWG tag line besides me typed a space intuitively and I had to tell them that that's not how that works. Well, now it is, if you prefer it. Maybe case-insensitivity will be next. I'm considering it. Wouldn't be hard to add. I'm not sure if I want it, though.

Another thing that improved drastically in that time is the time it takes to generate huge web sites. SBWG never had problems with giant files, even entry files with gigabytes of text, because the content body isn't parsed. But with thousands of entries or thousands of tags in one entry, generation time would previously go into hundreds of years (theoretically/calculated, of course). By improving some routines and caching some parts during the generation process I got the generation time of an example torture web site that I created, from over 300 years down to just short of 72 hours on my Core-i5 ultrabook onto an NVMe drive. Any reasonably sized web site even with a relatively large weblog is completely generated much quicker. So it would be possible to e.g. let SBWG re-generate a web site automatically multiple times a day without problems. I have other ideas that will speed up the generation process significantly, namely parallel processing and skipping of existing unchanged content. But both those features are not mature enough, yet. I will probably attend to them again when I have packed SBWG with so many features that slow down the process compared to the current version that I feel more parallelisation and more drastic caching will be necessary.

So, the first new feature on the list were entry pictures. A way to bind pictures, image files, to entries without having to include <img> tags. This feature now already developed into a general way to attach files to entries. Images are resized, embedded and linked to their originals, audio files are embedded as an audio player if the browser supports this, and other files are linked to allow visitors to download them. Video files will also be embedded as a player in future version. The file attachments feature is not done, yet. Enclosures in the RSS feed, presentation of the download links and many small things have to be improved. But the initial idea of entry pictures already works. There is a naming convention that makes a file an attachment to a certain entry. (The same naming convention as is used for style sheet sets.) See the README of version 0.10.2 or above for detailed information.

The next feature on the list is comment links below blog entries. Simple mailto links to let readers e-mail comments on entries to the author. I will probably start to work on multiple features at the same time again, as I did before.

So, I've published SBWG version 0.10.2 now. I hope I'll find the time to create and publish new versions more frequently again in the near future. But I doubt I will.