News You Can Bruise for 2002 October 24 (entry 4)

Thu Oct 24 2002 22:16 Daddy, Make The Man Stop Talking About NewsBruiser: Sorry, kid, but my insane ramblings will ring in your ears throughout this bus ride, yea, even all the way to Tampa. I just added import functionality to NewsBruiser: not import in any specific format, but the generic ability to retroactively post an entry. This will come in handy when I figure out what I need to do to "import from Manilla" to get that checkbox checked and bring in the old editthispage entries. And also, of course, import is essential for Segfault.

As so often happens to me, I thought it was going to be difficult to implement this but it was very easy. I added just one new method (given a time, figure out what entry ID an entry would have if it had been published at that time) and the rest snapped into place. I would like to attribute this outcome to some special ability on my part, but my genius mainly consists of intuiting the optimal ordering of my feature implementations: retroactive posting was easy because it uses most of the same code as entry deletion (it's just that instead of moving the ordinals of a day's entries back to eliminate one specific entry, you're moving those ordinals forward to accomodate a new one).

Of course, the elegance of Python helps with the snapping into place: Python frequently gives me the I-joined-lots-of-subsystems-and-they-worked-together epiphanies I call 'Lisp moments', without the I-misplaced-a-parenthesis-and-my-dog-exploded headaches I call 'Lisp moments'.