Month: July 2005

My friend John Giotta seems to have noticed that the newly released (yesterday) PSP browser is reporting it is Mozilla-based. If so, where is the source-code they based it on? The Mozilla Public License states that modified versions of the Mozilla code base must be posted for others to see the changes. This browser is unlike any Mozilla browsers I have seen.

The Photos section is now up and working! I also tweaked a few things to make it look prettier. I’ll be posting regular photos as I get them.

I found out from my friend Tripp today that CraigsList is now in Richmond! Go to http://richmond.craigslist.com for more info. I am told it has really gotten active over the last couple months and it looks like that’s true. I just submitted a post about knowrichmond.com and Stay N’ Alive Computer Productions to the site. We’ll see what fruit it brings. Tell your friends to make this an even bigger community!

A blog has so many components to it that fit in perfectly with Catalyst. Catalyst’s MVC-based framework makes maintainability simple and encourages contribution from the community. The model components can be created to force the blog to read from either flat file, from a database, or even from a web service such as SOAP. The view components would allow a developer to pick his poison in templating libraries. One could choose either Template Toolkit or HTML::Mason to render a page ready for browsing on the ‘net. The controller would present multiple ways of gluing all the pieces together.

Catalysts support of plugins would promote creation of plugins that would work with Jeens. One could create tools to render an image gallery or photo blog differently. One could implement better ways of using AJAX to accept user input and modification of those areas allowed for editing. The possibilities are endless.

I mentioned AJAX – I think AJAX is the future of website presentation. It reduces load on a server, is open for the public to view and see how things were done, and because of that encourages contribution. I intend Catalyst to rely on AJAX as much as possible. I really like the tool-man libraries that allow easy drag and drop, as well as double-clicking to edit an area on a web page. I envision the wiki components of Jeens to work this way. When one writes a blog entry they should be able to designate whether that entry is editable by others or not, and if so, all one has to do to edit is double click on the area, edit, and then click outside the area to submit the changes back to the server. It would probably work similar when a user is authenticated and wants to edit/add his or her own blog entries.

So far I’ve written Jeens to utilize MySQL for user management and permissions. I think I am going to move away from this and switch to more of a portable solution such as SQLite for both user management and wiki management. This will keep people from having to have a huge database server on their system just to get Jeens to work. Also, it will keep the MySQL/PostGres wars to a minimum. 😉 The great thing about it all is with the MVC framework someone can write a MySQL/Postgres component if they so desire and submit their own code to CPAN for use with Jeens.