mahiwaga

I'm not really all that mysterious

URLs

I know I have way too much free time on my hands. but I am again contemplating switching blogging engines.

as lovely as Blosxom is, I'm not entirely down with the file-format. it is admittedly very nicely simple: the first line is the title, the rest is output as is (in my case, garden-variety HTML, but other bloggers have implemented other markup languages [ATX][textile][wikiwordish].) but, unlike XML, it is not as easy to spot errors in the markup, particularly with the pre-theme flavor files. (and if you dig around my site for a while, you will see instances plagued by HTML errors such as unclosed <a> tags and mismatched <span> tags.)

so, because of my masochistic nature, I am trying to write my own blog engine based on XML and XSLT. I am a little apprehensive as to what sort of load this will cause to my webhost despite the light traffic, but there is always static rendering, I suppose. In reality, I'll just be writing a more dynamic version of my hand-kludged blog engine that I had been using previously, with more Perl and less XSLT.

I'm still stuck on parsing the requested URL. I have decided on the popular format of /category/subcategory/2004/02/07/slug, although I'm still wondering about the extension. on one hand, slug.html is kinda crufty looking. on the other hand, I like Blosxom's notion of flavors. still, the only other flavor that I can think of that would be worth supporting at this time is RSS, and while good for indices, I can't see the utility of serving up individual RSS entries. and this in itself leads to some parsing ugliness. if I stick to the flavor idea, then my RSS feeds will be specified like /category/subcategory/2004/02/07/index.rss, and I realize that index is pretty crufty. but if I discard flavors entirely, /category/subcategory/2004/02/07/rss would probably be how I should specify a feed, but I think it would cause a parsing nightmare. I think I would have to hard code it, but that also strikes me as inelegant.

so it's still a work in progress. I've spent a couple of days on the parsing routine already, using Blosxom's routine as a take off point. I've also been screwing around with regex's, but I imagine that would be processor intensive. so we'll see.

anyway, I found inspiration about non-crufty permalinks here:

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