Annotations, combined with a webserver that supports basic auth
and cgi scripts, builds and maintains weblogs. It maintains the weblog
as static pages, keeps articles in folders that tell you the date the
article was posted (YYYY/MM/DD/seq), and produces
RSS 2.0 and
Atom 1.0
syndication formats. It uses a variant on my
theme
program to do formatting of the weblog, and the default markup is labelled
for easier use of
CSS
WARNINGThis code is a horrible evil bodge that needs to be completely redesigned, and it’s highly recommended that you have garlic, a silver cross, and holy water on hand before you download it.
calendararchive in your weblog.confconfigure.sh,
format.c
byline() now supplies the <p class="byline">…</p>
block wrapperbyline() uses a rudimentary printf-style format for placing author
name (%A), post date (%D – w/ url link, %d – without), and %%
escape, plus \n -> newline and \\ -> \article(), call mkd_basename() to set the root for all
unqualified relative paths in urls.formatting.h, add a base field to struct fmt (to
pass to mkd_basename) and change struct markup byline
to char *bylineindexer.c
<FORM> block for the comment button even
if there are already comments.markdown(), call mkd_basename()
first so that I can resolve url fragments.readconfig.c,
byline is now a single-field configuration
instead of a pair.fmt.base from the provided url.rss.c, use fmt.base for mkd_basename() and
atom-format headers.The long national nightmare continues here; I discovered that my rss and atom feed generators weren’t producing valid feeds anymore, so I had to revise them to make them work properly.
Fortunately, the rss/atom syndication code is not written quite as horribly as the rest of this zombie, so I was able to fix the feed generation code without having to apply the head-desk user interface tool.
This version rips out my old home-grown text markup language and replaces it with my implementation of John Gruber’s Markdown.
The rubble is still bouncing from this retrofit, but I’ve taken a snapshot of the explosion so I can store it in a safe place for a while.
I’ve added some more functionality to the wiki-like behavior I started
to put into 1.0.3.5 – the original code would strip
the last component off pathnames when fabricating the control file, which
meant that the path weblog/legos/surveyship couldn’t be easily
reindexed. I went in and fixed this code, then went back in to fix some
code I broke when I added “index a single page” to reindex, then
went back in to fix some code I broke (resulting in terribly mangled
pathnames in permalinks) when I “fixed” the non-weblog-path-with-slash
reindex logic.
So, quick!, release the code before I break it again!
Yes, it’s been less than a month since the last release, but this is for a good reason. The machine I usually run tsfr on (a x86 box running SLS linux) has some fairly old SCSI disks on it, and they have finally reached the point where the badblocks list is filled up and badblocks are starting to appear in user-visible space) has developed some badblocks in the swap area, so the machine has taken to just falling over dead out of the clear blue sky. It did it most recently on a Saturday morning, so I had to move things from their comfortable home on pell over to a hostile workplace running Apache. So, to make this move actually work, I had to modify annotations to spit out error and redirect pages in a form that would not cause Apache to freak its tiny little brain out after someone posted an article or comment.
There are no new features here, just portability fixes.
After a brief six months, here’s another release. There are three little changes here that begin to make the code more versatile, so I will (eventually) be able to use it to run this website as a wiki. The changes are:
LOCATION,
which is the path from the bbs root to the page in question.<?theme [include-file]?> can now include a
variable. The only useful variable is $LOCATION, but you
can use this to do something like <?theme [$LOCATION/message.css]?>
if you wish to have page-specific css to override site-wide css.
(If you do do this, you need to wrap the css with <STYLE>;
and </STYLE>, because annotations doesn’t know you’re
doing something fancy with it.)reindex and add comments to pages located
anywhere under bbsroot. The pages need to be set up in the
standard format, with a message.txt containing the text of
the page and a message.ctl containing the metadata,
but once you’ve done that “reindex $LOCATION-of-page”
will properly generate an index.html for you, and commenting
will then work as it does anywhere else.A trivial patch, of interest only to people who care about portability; I tried to compile the code on a redhat 8.0 system, with somewhat less that complete success, so I did a round of patching and ended up with a version that does actually compile on that OS.
As a little something extra, I’ve started to put support for post categories into the code, so you can enter a list of comment-separated categories when you make your post and it will be nicely filed into those categories when I get around to writing the rest of the code support.
rewrite.c wasn’t in version control. Ooops.It’s a new year, and time for some new features in the code. Not very much has changed in this version; I’ve redone the way that comments are stored from the traditional One Big File to a directory containing the comments in a combined data/control format. The hooks for moderated comments have been put in (but not deliberatedly added), and there’s now a user-settable flag that governs whether comment email addresses are published or not (default: not.)
A couple of bug A couple of bugs were introduced, then
deleted, and I’ve added (in what turns out to be a fairly
hackish way) a procedure for doing article truncation on the
homepage; if you put a <!more!> token into your article,
the homepage will display the article up to that point, then
a –more– (this text is user settable by the readmore=
variable in weblog.conf) link to the whole article.
Finally, I tweaked the way that the weblog builds the index
and post pages to show nrposts= posts, no matter how
old they are.
With 2005 rapidly coming to an end, a new release. This one includes the usual crop of undocumented features, but it also include DOCUMENTATION, which is woefully incomplete, but it’s there.
To go along with the documentation, I’ve also changed the config file name and format, plus added a setup.weblog script that will do the initial setup for a user and a xmlpost program that allows you to publish posts via xml.
tm_mon went from 0 to 11 or 1 to 12; these were making
the month rollovers at the end of January pretty interesting.Like I’m doing with everything else, I’m tracking code bloat as the software gets older and more feature-ridden.
