This is the first new entry written using the new blog-o-matic functionality of HTML Editor. In truth I am worried that this text will be accidentally whisked away into nowhere land, but we shall just see what happens.
One thing that feels wierd is that new entries will now be written on their own pages… as they are stored in the archive. This makes it harder to spontaneously reference/revist previous entries, and I might have to work out some kind of compromise with regards to this.
The blog should look largely the same as before, only now there will be permalinks at the bottom of each entry (except on the individual entry pages themselves)
I will probably also add some sort of "auto-build" which actually generates new archive pages where appropriate, as HTML editor currently relies on the user to create every page.
To be honest the functionality still feels as messy as hell, because there is no way to get around having to upload potentially megabytes of HTML everytime a change is made to a page template [eg to add a link to the left hand column]. Other tools will do that rebuilding on the server side, so you don’t need to think about it and to a degree the messiness can be hidden from you.
Holding on to WYSIWYG
One thing I would like to hold on to is the WYSIWYG nature of my blogging. As I type this I see it exactly as it will appear, ie I do NOT have to manually enter HTML tags or any of that guff. This has always been a bit of a challenge because I am still using Microsoft’s DHTML ActiveX control as my primary editor, and [ahem] it’s not exactly XHTML compliant, so occasionally I have to go in and add tags and attributes manually because they have been brutally stomped.
The way I have been blogging [until now] has been surprisingly simple. I simply edit the main log page directly. So basically I can see the whole page exactly as it will be seen on line, and then I can edit/delete/insert whatever entries I please. It only gets complicated when I have to do the archives, a process performed once a month or so which involves chopping the page in half and saving the oldest part separately, into a file which will probably never be edited manually again (but still can be).
What I think I would really like to do is to keep that same workflow but remove the manual archiving part, making a tool which will scan the "main" page as currently edited and spit out the separate entries and whatever other archive formats are required.
Yes. I think I’ll try to do it that way.