News You Can Bruise

I have from the beginning felt that my paper is a much better contribution to the field of computer science than the Ultra Gleeper itself. The Gleeper, like all flesh, is frail and has shortcomings, but the paper exists in the realm of ideas, and solves all the damn problems and crowns me king of the world already.

Regrettably I have used this fact as an excuse to not work on making the Ultra Gleeper easier to install and use. I am a mess, I have writing assignments and even despite that I'm lazy and don't do work (this is also the reason I have not responded to your email). Also I beat myself up about the absolute amount of time I waste, even though by relative standards I'm a pretty productive guy.

Oh yeah, as long as I'm touting accomplishments that just highlight my lack of follow-through. blogs.gnome.org has started using NewsBruiser for their user weblogs, and they say nice things about me that I don't think are deserved. Also Benjamin Kahn ported one of those standard weblog themes (ie. one of the ones you see everywhere on weblogs of all shapes and sizes) to NewsBruiser. It looks nice!

I have no idea why I tried this before and found it really difficult. Either I fixed the problem while doing something else, or I was trying to have the permalink be the ordinal of the comment (which might change if comments get deleted) instead of the post time. I'd rather have a human-recognizable anchor than one that would be ambiguous if two people should happen to post comments in the same second.

First, the spam I was getting seemed to be manually entered. There were long (by web bot standards) and irregular pauses between hits from spammers, and slightly differing spam methodologies. Sometimes the log message for a spammy change had a solitary "d" or "df" in it, the mark of a person used to scribbling crap data into web forms. It was kind of sad to imagine the people whose job it is to manually spam wikis, like an email spammer who must manually type in SMTP commands. Maybe I'm missing all the bot-based attacks because I use a relatively unpopular wiki software (just as the only comment spam I've ever seen on NewsBruiser was manually entered)

What is new and interesting, though, is the way the wiki spammers locate wikis to spam. To get things started there must be some bots that can spam SubWiki, or particularly persistent manual wiki spammers. But once there is any spam at all in a wiki, a pheremone trail has been laid down and the hordes close in.

You see, the majority of manual wiki spammers seem to be free riders who use search engines to find wikis that have already been spammed, then go in and replace the preexisting spam with their spam. The internicene warfare rages without end, as spammers destroy each others' contributions to the wikispamosphere while making a mockery of the work of the original spammer who went through all the trouble of finding that wiki in the first place, or writing a bot that could spam SubWiki. For shame!

There are a variety of engines and sub-techniques in use, but the most common one is to search for "wiki" plus the name of a site to which wiki spam points. Then, for each hit, go into the wiki and replace the (spam) text of the page with your own spam text. This anti-wiki-spam organization has documented this behavior, but not its comical implication.

Until I can figure out a better solution which hopefully doesn't involve me doing a whole lot of SubWiki development or switching wiki software, I am going to do a little free riding of my own. I've implemented a couple solutions that protect the NewsBruiser wiki only because it's not worth five seconds of a spammer's time to figure out what's going on, when there are so many other wikis they could be spamming.

Update: Actually, judging from the accesses from that IP on that date, it looks like someone went poking around NYCB with a web browser and posted spam on two specific entries. Weird.

Update again: The bug is fixed and the spam is gone.

I'm sure there's something you're supposed to do ahead of time to prevent Python from choking on those characters, and that I'll hear all about it soon, but this is still useful because you can use it to get rid of the Microsoft smart quotes. Everyone hates Microsoft smart quotes, right?

The feature was written as part of the del.icio.us integration (thus the shortness of the shrift), but you can use it standalone. Instead of selecting categories from a list you can just type in their names. Categories that don't exist get created. It's so easy to use, no wonder it's #1 (for del.icio.us interfaces). If I didn't have so much invested in my baroque system of long category names, I'd start using it for NYCB. I may do so anyway. I'm a loose cannon, Richardson! Turn in my badge!

But wait! Surely the fact that it's such an old joke is the key to how best to use it. In this computerized age, can we not automate the rituals that, while not actually giving us satisfaction, give a sort of second-order satisfaction when we see that others still perform them? Do we dare treat a running gag not with the deference due to age but with the surgeon's eye of the seasoned refactorer?

Indeed we do. Now that I [still Seth] use Leonard's NewsBruiser weblog software, all sorts of crazy plugins are within my reach. If only Leonard would write a NewsBruiser plugin that implemented this bizarre in-joke! Then my [Seth's] birthday would be complete!

Well, far be it from me [Leonard] to interfere with the completeness of Seth's birthday. The Birthday Incompleteness Theorem notwithstanding, I present NB-SethDavidSchoen, the most useless NewsBruiser plugin ever, and the first to come in a standalone package (the two are related). Furthermore, I've flipped the switch on my own weblog for the remainder of Seth's birthday.

As are we all, I'm Seth David Schoen.

This is one of the projects and to be honest there's not much on its notecard except the name--that's how lazy I am. But phase one is now complete: you can now take arbitrary RSS feeds and aggregate them into a NewsBruiser weblog, a la my arch-rival Scott's Planet.

Viola! I give you the long-promised Richardson/Chadwick/Matkin/Whitney/Walch recipe weblog! Right now it only has me and Susanna since we're the only ones with a category where our recipes go. If you've got a weblog on this site and you want in, send me mail and I'll show you how to create a category. You don't have to do anything special to get recipes to show up in this weblog; just post to your category and they'll show up within an hour.

This was the main reason I wrote Beautiful Soup, so it's been in my head a while. I've been building it up in pilfered snatches of time and it's good enough to release now. It's also the first project created under the aegis of the new Center for High-Energy NewsBruiser, the name I like so much I'm going to use it for my other NewsBruiser-as-web-platform projects.

Give it a try if anything there interests you. I'm especially proud of the text excerpts in the Gutenberg feeds, and the clickable maps in the piracy report.

Sometimes it takes a day or so for me to remember that I wrote a plugin-based system and not just a system where you have to put new features in a directory called "plugins", but eventually I figure it out.

The del.icio.us plugin is in NewsBruiser, but I think it's stretching the limits of what should be in NewsBruiser. I can't see that many other people really wanting to echo certain of their weblog entries to their del.icio.us accounts. Am I wrong?

More NewsBruiser meta-stuff later.

It's well-known that typos spawn ideas. Such an idea: the I Want Options library should spawn a knockoff called I Want Potions.

Note that rewriting goes both ways. If you use rewrite rules you also need to create a Python class that rewrites the URLs NewsBruiser generates, so that it outputs the nice URLs that will trigger your rewrite rules. I can help you with this too, if you want.

And if you like to import things, you're in luck. Not only can you hook a NewsBruiser weblog up to a Moveable Type weblog and suck down all the entries, comments, and trackbacks; it now comes with a lumbering Tor Johnson of an HTML machete (deserving of its own post, tomorrow) that you can use to exhume weblog entries (and things-that-should-be-weblog-entries) from their nonstandard HTML coffins.

You'll forgive me if all that functionality makes me wax poetic for a bit. Over the past year or so I've been thinking about weblogs, syndication, online communities, information retrieval, the next step in computer-mediated communication... the whole bit. I haven't been talking about it much, because I don't do the grand vision thing well. In my experience, a grand vision is largely a pheremonal advertisement for the person with the vision. I see instead a lot of little strategies and experiments. The world doesn't need another wannabe visionary, but I figure if I can make some incremental improvements and implement some ideas, I can hold my head high with the rest of them.

This ties into NewsBruiser like so: you know how a lot of open source software projects start out with an idea to write a program to do one task, then get it into their heads to do a generalization of that task, and keep integrating the task over some variable and never get anything done? I am fortunate and happy to report that the history of NewsBruiser development has been the good twin of that phenomenon.[0] All this time I've been envisioning and implementing slight tweaks to NewsBruiser concepts that open up new vistas, restricted liftings of restrictions that make it more powerful. Such changes add up, and somewhere during the past year the application became capable of being a platform. Those slight tweaks are becoming more powerful, and my crackpot ideas for fearsome electronic beasts are resolving themselves into simpler and simpler transforms on the NewsBruiser codebase.

But as they say, talk is cheap. I'll let you know when the killer app is done. For now, we've just got a really good weblog system.

[0] The urge to generalize is natural, and it's not hard to generalize without biting off more than you can chew: you start with a working system; you make incremental improvements; you make sure all improvements have a working system as their endpoint; and you try very hard to make the new system as simple to use as the old system, assuming you don't care about the new features. Above all, be patient. It will be better and come faster, and you'll get a better understanding of the problem domain if you don't try to do everything at once. Slow and steady wins the race. A stitch in time saves nine. Neither a borrower nor a lender be.

PS: Zack, Mike, everyone else who's interested: give this version a try. Let me know if you have problems or feature requests.

Incidentally, I've noticed a worrying difference between email spam and weblog spam. With email spam, the spammer can maybe approximate your spam list (after all, even spammers get spam), but they can't see your non-spam list without cracking your email account. On the other hand, with weblog spam no one sees the spam you deleted, but all the non-spam comments are right there for everyone to see and parse. It would be trivial for a comment spammer to post an exact repeat of someone else's comment but with Viagra links all over the place. In the long run, a Bayesean filter for comment spam might degenerate into an IP and URL blacklist. Is there any algorithmic defense against an attacker who has access to everything previously blessed by the algorithm?

PS: There must be a more effective way to do this?

If you're interested in the progress of the Brendan/Leonard logo collaboration, check out the Gallery of Rejected NewsBruiser Logos. The dimetrodon was my original idea, and in the face of all evidence I still think we could have gotten it to work out somehow.

PS: Coming soon: more Kevan mania. Wait til you see the link he sent me! You won't believe the twist! Because it's based on a counterfactual!

PPS: Already here but not actually released: mine and Peter's weblog-ish hypertext versions of Gogol's Diary of a Madman. There's also fifty contemporary weblogs with the same title, most probably named after the Ozzy Osbourne song rather than directly after the story. Find the next trend before it happens!

Joe says that there was a glowing review of NewsBruiser in the UK magazine Linux Format.
...
Joe is sending me the magazine and I'm gonna type it up.
...
Just another way in which my life is less exciting than Pepys': fewer random onstage beatings.
[Nb. I guess that's the subplot?]

And now, the continuation...

Got the package in the mail today. I thought "Huh, this looks like a magazine. I didn't order a magazine! Huh, this looks like overseas mail. Who would send me a magazine... from another country?" I forgot that my life has continuity. Anyway, the article is as glowing as Joe said it was, and as promised I've typed up the review and plan to shamelessly exploit it for promotional purposes. Some choice quotes from the review:

"[O]ne of the best blogging utilities doing the rounds."

"Installation is brilliantly simple..."

"[T]he whole system runs like clockwork."

"Friendly, organised, versatile and great to use."

How do you like that bookending? Thanks, Joe!

Update: Your Earth FAQ has the answer.

Coming soon, if you're interested: easily-derivable-from-first-principles secrets of how to get the most bang for your Freshmeat announcement buck.

New comment features: you can automatically shut down comments on old entries, and you can turn on comments for specific entries instead of for the whole site.

Joe says that there was a glowing review of NewsBruiser in the UK magazine Linux Format. Since they don't do aspiring weblog software authors the favor of putting their glowing reviews online, Joe is sending me the magazine and I'm gonna type it up. And as long as we're discussing Linux magazines with weird names, how about India's Linux For You?

Dear Leonard,

Your newsbruiser was introduced in one of the magazines published in Korea, and

(Don't worry, NewsBruiser is not going to become a JavaScript monstrosity. I need JavaScript so that static entry pages can have the comment fields prepopulated with your remembered information. If you don't have JavaScript, the comment cookie stuff won't work on a site with static entry files; that's all.)

• Comment author cookie so you don't have to keep typing in your stuff
• Keep track of recent annotations and provide an RSS feed, as well as an SSI to get the "recent comments" effect you see, eg. on Steve's weblog.
• Better validation for the author fields
• Comment permalinks (I tried doing this early this morning, but it turns out I have to change the template system to get it to work properly).
• Mention comment spam guess next to comment.
• Replace current "You don't see anything with spam probability >50" system with more flexible user-specified filter system.
• Automatically shut off comments for entries past a certain age and/or with a certain amount of time since the last comment.
• Send email to admin when a comment or trackback comes in.
• Import of Bayesian classification data from a Cheatsheet file.

Stuff you don't care about because it's internal:

• Create separate screens for posting comments and marking them as spam.

Of course, since basically all the comment stuff is in one file, you could hack on it yourself instead of waiting for me.

Other reasons why you should look at that screenshot: the first fake weblog name is really good, good enough for someone to use[0], and while making up fake spam for the sample Bayesian network I came up with the phrase "the set of all sluts".

I think the lack of comments is the leading cause of people who might use NewsBruiser not using NewsBruiser. Every time people complain about Blogger or Moveable Type, I (along with every other penny-ante weblog software author) see an opportunity to plug our own software. I'm too shy to actually do it, though. I'm stuck in the naive hacker's world where if I make something better everyone will automatically use it.

I still need weblog spam from you. I want to provide a starter Bayesian network with NewsBruiser, and I need me some data. The trackbacks and comments will share a Bayesian network, BTW; the datasets are undoubtedly similar, and that will cut down on training time.

PS: I made Reverend work with Python 1.5, because I live in a cave. If you're interested, it's here.

[0] Another weblog name I made up recently: "Commodius Vicus". You're welcome.

Sumana: Is this a semantic web thing?
Leonard: Nooo...
Sumana: You know I can tell when you do something with the semantic web.
Leonard: Yes, dear.

NewsBruiser has incoming trackback now, incidentally. The display is pretty ugly, but I've got all the neccessary templating in place. (I'm still looking for some general UI help with NewsBruiser, actually).

Throughout my plugin adventure I've been bothered by Robert X. Cringeley's argument against refactoring. Was I refactoring to improve NewsBruiser or just futzing around with the code to give myself something to do? I kept reminding myself that I was doing this to make it easier to introduce new features that other people had written. Now that it's done, new features are easier to write and don't clutter up the main code. Lousy programming conscience! Take that, Robert X. Cringely!

There were also a couple plugins I had seemingly abandoned in mid-change a long time ago, and I had to whip them into shape. I'll start testing on Crummy tomorrow and hopefully release version 2.0 next week.

Timo's installation story is pretty harrowing, but only one of his problems was directly caused by NewsBruiser (and it's been fixed in CVS), so I feel a little better. It's always painful setting up a web application on a machine you don't control; I tried to design NewsBruiser for that situation because I know the feeling. Anyway, I hope Timo has a great time with NewsBruiser.

Incidentally, the download URL I gave Timo is this one, and here's the patch against nb/NewsBruiserCGIs.py which fixes the infinite loop problem in version 1.13.0. I guess I'll have to release a version as soon as I get Internet back:

131c131
<         while not os.path.exists(dir):
---
>         while dir and not os.path.exists(dir):

All of this is completely irrelevant to the fact that NewsBruiser now has an entry in the prestigious FSF/UNESCO Free Software Directory (UNESCO? They just got involved, apparently.)

[0] Actually, I am kidding. Before my initial NewsBruiser submission was approved, I was interrogated by the Freshmeat admins as to what was so great about NewsBruiser that they should put up another pointer to a weblog program. I think this is a good idea, and I think Freshmeat's reputation for being a repository of pointers to useless, unfinished software is mainly because they don't want to go back and deal with all the packages they added in pre-interrogation days. I check the new packages on Freshmeat every couple weeks for Software Roundup, and even the stuff I'm not interested in is pretty original. Compare SourceForge, which doesn't even care.

I fully believe that flowers spring from concrete wherever you walk. It totally works!

Huzzah!

I wanted to make NBNFAO a goofy-looking pseudotainment site like Cool 2B Real, so that the younger generation would be tricked into sampling hot NewsBruiser tips, not knowing that I was secretly underwriting the whole affair in hopes of boosting their NewsBruiser consumption. That fell through because I lack the neccessary design skills, so it's the same (admittedly icky green, which might play well with males 5-8) scheme as the rest of Tigris, and the NewsBruiser Flash hangman game will have to wait. Instead, I'm going the Astroturf route, like Dr. Pepper before me, recruiting key bloggers to discretely shill for NBNFAO on their sites. Unfortunately, that's not going too well either; I've only been able to convince one blogger to agree to the formatting and tone requirements that best reflect the sheer extremeness of the NewsBruiser brand.

Anyway, I released NewsBruiser 1.12, "Remote Control Rhino". It's got the XML-RPC interfaces and many bug fixes and enhancements. In fact, I'll be using it right now to import my old editthispage entries.

Update: Success! Eg. "dinoflagellate", The Even Newer Economy.

I wrote a little CGI for NewsBruiser what implements the MetaWeblog and Blogger XML-RPC APIs. It needs a little refactoring before I commit, but it works. Soon you'll be able to... do various things. And the company that'll bring it to you: NewsBruiser, Inc.

1. NewsBruiser uses the Unix-specific crypt module to encrypt passwords. Fortunately, there is a pure Python implementation. This is also good because crypt isn't included with the default Python package on Unix, so bundling my own crypt will increase portability on Unix.
2. NewsBruiser uses the Unix-specific fcntl module to lock the list of pending index updates. On Windows it can use a method in the msvcrt module instead.
3. I made the assumption in a bunch of places that the path separator character is '/'; I need to go through and fix those, or NewsBruiser will generate horribly broken URLs and have problems finding files.

Pretty good, I think. I'm also thinking seriously about a paper topic. I think I'll probably go with demonstrating the simple web interface to the configuration file, focusing on the technique rather than the specific tool (I think the specifics of web apps differ too much for such a tool to be both understandable and generally applicable, but I could be wrong).

Aaron sends a link to the Dr. Fun comic about Donald Knuth that he mentioned last night.

Joe Mahoney on the Python talk:

How about giving a talk on how you've gone about implementing all the different items on that weblog software checklist. The title could be "Treating Feature-itis with Python"

Also, "Newsbruiser! Who ate all the pies?" works in the theme song [Naturally! -ed.]

Brendan on same:

How about just a talk on maintaining your own open-source software as a one-person team? Plenty of people do it, sure, but not many I've seen have the design consistency or version control of NewsBruiser.

And on bags of holding:

You're right about the lame prohibition, in a way--according to the 3rd ed DMG, living things can be placed in the bag, but suffocate after ten minutes. There wasn't anything in the 2nd ed DMG or Unearthed Arcana, though, so it obviously took a while to think up. Maybe the bag is made of astral elastic, so it's always just the right size for the sum of its contents, and air just gets squished out. Or maybe it's a linked list.

So, I can think of a couple topics for a speech and discussion. I'd like feedback from you on what sounds interesting. I've included several ideas, along with the rebuttal provided by my internal critic. Background for those who need it: NewsBruiser is a web-based Python application of about 7500 lines which lets you run weblogs. Python is my favorite programming language; I use it a little bit at work and a lot at home, but I'm not an expert.

• NewsBruiser specifically - an overview. (This is lame and self-aggrandizing; you can just download it for an overview! Rebuttal to rebuttal: a lot of people like to learn about some piece of software by talking to the author about it. But it is self-aggrandizing.)

• Weblog software in Python, with NewsBruiser as a case study (This is a good idea, since I don't know of any other weblog software in Python except for PyBloxsom, so it's not something everyone knows about. The only problem is that this assumes that there's something inherently interesting about doing weblog software in Python, as opposed to doing some other kind of software in Python or doing weblog software in some other language.)

• It's easy to hide the complexity of those config files with a simple CGI interface! (Right now this is part of NewsBruiser; I'd need to separate it into a nice little includable library. But it's a good idea, and I could probably make it fun.)

• Writing self-contained Python applications and/or Python applications that run on old versions of Python. (Boooring. Besides, I don't have any systematic way of doing this; it's just a matter of choosing the right tools and writing to the right APIs.)

• Writing a program that's easy and fun to hack on. I've heard from several people (or seen it mentioned on their weblogs) that they downloaded NewsBruiser and hacked it to do such-and-so. This doesn't neccessarily speak well of NewsBruiser's not having accommodated them in the first place (though many old hacks have since been turned into core features), but it does speak well of NewsBruiser's hackability. What's my secret? I don't know, but I could try to find out in time for the deadline. (This seems like a good fit for the conference, so no real rebuttal here, but more than one case study would help with generalizations.)

• Picking the right abstraction: much well-designed software is great because it embodies a simplifying abstraction: witness UNIX's "everything is a file", or Plan 9's "everything is a file, and we mean it this time". Unfortunately, much poorly-designed software is awful precisely because it embodies the wrong abstraction. How to pick the right abstraction? (This could be fun, but I can't envision the people attending my talk having less experience than myself in picking abstractions.)

• Hiding UI complexity from those who didn't ask for it. NewsBruiser has a lot of features, and many features expose to the user knobs they can twiddle or forms they have to fill out. I choose defaults that expose as few knobs and forms as possible. (That's pretty weak tea, but it's all I can think of to say on the topic; it might be good as part of a larger talk, possibly the config interface talk.)

[0] Except, I might have an idea which the conference planners like but no one else does, so that no one shows up; or I might have an idea which sounds good enough to get people to show up but which actually is a waste of time. Also, I might show up to the talk in only my underwear, then suddenly be falling off of a cliff.

In other cleaning-out-my-inbox news, the aforementioned-if-you-count-inclusion Seth David Schoen writes:

If one were to remark on the appearance of our area code early in the decimal expansion of pi, one could say

Newsbruiser!
415's in pi!

Then one could debate, per Hempel, whether this helps to disconfirm the hypothesis that pi is not normal in base 10.

And Andy Holloway takes valuable time away from corrupting the youth to write:

Maybe it then proceeds to bruise all news pertaining to the eating of the pie. That news will think twice before it touches your pie again!

NYCB regrets that this correspondence is not yet closed.

NewsBruiser!
Holds up half the sky!

NewsBruiser!
Blogging on the sly!

NewsBruiser!
Featureful and spry!

NewsBruiser!
Usabili-tie!

NewsBruiser!
Someday you will die!

That last one is useful for putting the lie to Doc Searls' (??? I can't find it anywhere) observervation that "Everybody dies" is an idea never seen in advertising.

NewsBruiser!

Only you sing it like "Transformers!" in the Transformers theme song. This is actually the better of the two versions. The extended remix goes:

NewsBruiser!
More than eats the pie!

Again like the beginning of the Transformers theme song. I don't know what qualities enable NewsBruiser to exceed mere eating the pie, but it's a theme song that Joe Mahoney will like, which is the important thing.

NewsBruiser 1.9.2 also features Brendan Adkins' "Timothy" theme, which is pretty sharp.

you advise andy holloway to jump from the frying pan of his horribly invalid html to the fire of even more horribly invalid html. span can't contain p. any inheritable formatting properties associated with the span shouldn't make it into the p because the p essentially terminates the span - if a browser does otherwise it's part of its (nonstandard) error handling. my first concern with theme development/ui is to make it difficult to produce invalid html. it's not productive to try to apply css to html that can't be parsed in a deterministic way.

Shows what I know.

Update: Yeah, that was faster.

So far I've recruited Brendan into my conspiracy to commit themes. Any other takers?

What's the best way to do this? People who already have NewsBruiser installed can just mess around with their install. For others, I could create a temporary notebook on crummy. Is anyone interested in that?

In more labor-intensive UI news, I'd also really appreciate it if someone would come up with some UI standards for NewsBruiser. I've been doing it sort of ad hoc and it's not as consistent as I'd like.

Why, you ask, did we not instead make use of that marvel of HTML, the text link? I'm not sure (I'd never even asked myself that question until just now). Probably because I was trying for an exact lookalike of the earlier HTML version, which was itself a lookalike of a version done in some proprietary hypertext system, which was itself a lookalike of a version done in a third hypertext system, and so on back 10 or 15 years to the dawn of PC hypertext systems (my version is called 'madman7', and there's talk between Peter and I of a madman8). Somewhere in the DOS era there was probably a hypertext system that didn't know about or didn't want to rely on terminal bold or reverse video to signify linked text, and so displayed the link as an asterisk next to the linked text. I actually think madman7 looks nicer with the triangle than it would with linked text, but I may have to revisit that.

Anyway, here's the triangle, the colors darkened a little for NewsBruiser: . I like it better than the old triangle I made by hand , so I'm going to start using it for NYCB and after I check with Peter I'm going to make it the NewsBruiser default permalink image.

Note the subtle use of attachments there.

The image upload code is nicer now, and it is now useful in conjunction with NewsBruiser instead of being a completely separate piece of functionality that happens to share an interface, and I've started using it on this site (see screenshot which is brought to you by the technology of which it's a screenshot). This needs testing before I'm comfortable with another release, though. If anyone thinks this feature is cool and would like to test what's in CVS, I'd love that (or I can make a tarball for you if you're scared of CVS, as I once was).

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'.

I'm eventually going to add a way to package a CSS file and some template files as a "theme" in a directory. This will have four beneficial effects:

1. It will be easy to demonstrate NewsBruiser's increasingly wackass (that is to say, more wack per unit ass) layout possibilities without manually changing the template strings forward and back.
2. I'll be able to package a bunch of prebuilt themes with NewsBruiser.
3. People who love to tweak HTML and CSS but who don't love Python coding will have a mechanism for contributing stuff to NewsBruiser.
4. I will get to check the "multiple templates" and "remote templates" boxes on the blog tool comparison chart.

Sumana said I should write a song called "The NewsBruiser Blues".

More NewsBruiser progress this evening. It's almost ready to run Segfault; I just need to add the ability to retroactively post an entry (and I need to convert all those stories I got from the Internet Archive from God-awful Segfault HTML into something I can feed NewsBruiser). I also eventually need image upload and an author index, but that is frosting.

Update: I deleted a couple NYCB entries from March 2000 which were actually entries from Susanna's notebook that accidentally got copied into the NYCB directory, and which for the past two years have been providing amusement to those who read my archives and see me suddenly talking about my boyfriend and claiming to be a soapdish. I still don't trust entry deletion because the thing I don't trust is deleting entries when you posted entries later in the day and those entries belong to a bunch of categories. (I've tested that, but I don't trust it. You know what I need? Trusted computing!)

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]

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.

Update: I took some screenshots and made them part of the NewsBruiser site.

Update: It's in CVS, and I'm using it here. I need to write the category documentation before I can release 1.4.0 though.

Here's a screenshot. Note the HTML sparseness that is the hallmark of the Leonard Realism style.

Mike found a couple bugs in 1.3.0 which make it difficult to actually run a new NewsBruiser installation, so if you were planning on doing that please wait until tonight when I can fix them. I also found another problem with using indexer to do incremental indexing, and I'm not sure how to fix that, but I'll at least put a stopgap solution in place tonight.

Reindexing after an add or an edit is too slow for me. I'm thinking of saving up reindexing tasks and taking care of them immediately before the next search. That will amortize the cost of writing the index to disk, and, more importantly, shift the wait onto people who do searches, like you, and away from the people who write entries, like me. (It's not a big wait, about 1 second. But I'd rather make a searcher wait 1 second sometimes than wait 1 second myself all the time). Adding an entry already takes long enough to do the weblogs.com ping.

You can get this from CVS; if there aren't huge problems I'll release 1.2 tonight or tomorrow. Be warned that you have to change your configuration files around a bit.

I did not spend all day doing this. Just so you know.

The other thing I want to do is have a hook that you can have executed on the text of your notebook entry. So I can <pre> the freshmeat entries, and put the time formatting thing in there for the other notebooks. That will have to wait until I move everything over to Python.