News You Can Bruise for 2002 September 22

Oops. I had the 'notify weblogs.com' box checked on my NewsBruiser development installation, so weblogs.com has periodically been notified of exciting changes to 'My Notebook' by 'Joe Newsbruiser'. Sorry. (Hopefully weblogs.com knows to ignore pings where the weblog is at 'localhost').

I hope you didn't download NewsBruiser 1.4.2, because I just released NewsBruiser 1.5.0. It's got a templating system (*cough* checklist *cough*) that's both simple and fast. Check it out. I also got honest with myself and added about 10 things to the TODO.

It takes a little time to roll a NewsBruiser release, although about 98% of that time is uploading the file and publishing the news item and sneakily releasing it again because I found another bug immediately after releasing it. Everything else I've automated, and as of 1.5.0 I've even automated that portion of the news item that can be automated (the link to the changelog and whatnot). But it's still a little boring, so to lighten the drudgery I've decided to make up silly code names for NewsBruiser releases. 1.5.0 is the "Pig In A Blanket" release.

How can a movie have a "guest star"? You're either in the movie or you're not.

Evilfinder is the perfect companion to The Arbitrary Text Code. It also has the advantage of actually existing in a usable form. And, of course, it's evil.

Just in case you're not yet sick of me talking about NewsBruiser, let me tell you how proud I am of the new stuff. I was looking at the changelog and I noticed that a lot of the cool features I take completely for granted (the category system and the configuration system) didn't exist or wasn't usable a mere eight days ago. I don't even use the templating system (yet?), so that's not on my radar, but because I wrote it I know enough about it to know that it's cool.

I'm definitely a much better programmer than I used to be (and Python fits my style). My self-stereotype is that I'm good at code and awful at interface design, but the interfaces I've designed for NewsBruiser are good and I know how to improve them. How did this happen? [Obvious answer: practice]

One last thing before the sleeping: the long-awaited Tonight's Episode archive.