draft0 - a shared blog by just some people

Lately I'm making only slow progress with SBWG. I'm determined to make this something that I'm comfortable with sharing as 1.0.0 online. Something that works and could arguably be called a somewhat finished peace of software. That doesn't mean that the todo list won't be huge at the point I change the version number to 1.0.0. But it should be in a relatively good state for what I've decided it will encompass at version 1.0.0. "Relatively" because it's still also a learning project and I would write many things differently if I started over, which means I'll have to rewrite them at some point to be satisfied with SBWG.

So, the goal and roadmap is set for v0.9.0 and v1.0.0 and a large part of what is still to be done is documentation and other things I don't enjoy doing as much as starting to implement new features. I'm holding back on working on things that are not on that roadmap so that I don't introduce new bugs and the need of further testing. First I want to improve what SBWG can already do.

That means that there won't be many interesting changes in the coming weeks (or maybe even months). Today I've decided to call what I've currently got version 0.8.9 and publish it on the project page.

I rarely wrote updates on SBWG before now. I just worked on it whenever I had time and felt like it. And that was quite often. But this is my website where I want to feel fine with pretending that what I'm posting is of any real interest to anybody. So I may post more updates on what I did to approach my goals for SBWG 1.0 from now on. It is rare for me that I invest so much time in a single project. And since I'm starting this blog at the same time and want to fill it with a lot of content, it is time to combine the two.

Some things that I did and changed but didn't report on so far: The header format of entry and page source files has been changed completely (simplified), the generated HTML became more complete, the idea of a sourced settings file came (first to me, then reality), new tag types have been formed, the sorting of blog entries is much more mature now, many more customisation possibilities cropped up and I developed an overall vision of what SBWG will become.

The code grew so much over the time. But it was mostly for very good reasons. I'm feeling overall quite content with how clean the code became and how many contingencies I took into account. It's probably still not "professional" code. But it is a new level of professionalism for me and my Bash scripts. Should I ever come close to getting through all the tiny, small, irrelevant, important, stupid, huge, new and old to-dos, it would probably be quite presentable. So many small features have been added that I hadn't thought of when I startet to write SBWG. Multi-author blogs are supported now, tags can be substituted for icons, a basic RSS feed works, ...

The way tagpages of topic (top:) tags are displayed is pretty much complete and the way I intended it to look when I first thought of splitting blog entry tags into two tag types. Basically, categories (cat: tags) are like classic tags in blogs: a way to add keywords to entries and list all entries that are tagged with that keyword. Topic tags on the other hand are meant to tag entries that talk about a certain topic about which a visitor might want to read up regardless of when individual entries on the topic have been posted. A topic tapage represents an index on a topic. It lists all the entries that are relevant to the topic in a structured way. You could write a book, one chapter per blog entry and have it simultaniously presented as a weblog (with category tags) and as a orderly indexed book in which visitors up a certain chapter. I still have to make up my mind on how I want to structure my own blog entries. But the fuctionality in the software is there. I will very likely also add another feature that enables structuring entries and pages into custom menues. So the options for web site builders will be grand with this weird took.