Public Mercurial repository online

To go with the newly-added issue tracker, LnBlog finally has a publicly accessible code repository.

Last week I started playing with Mercurial and switched LnBlog from Subversion to that. In the process, I set up a web-accessible central repository. Previously, I'd just run the Subversion repository on my local machine, but since Mercurial makes it so easy to set up the web-based repository, I figured why not?

You can access the repository at http://hg.skepticats.com/lnblog. Feel free to browse the code, clone the repository, and send me any changesets if you're so inclined.

I have returned

It's been three years since I updated this site, but I'm back. After a fairly long hiatus, I've decided to pick up development of LnBlog again.

There are several reasons for this. The first, and most pressing, is that I still use this software for my personal blog, and I don't really want to migrate to something else. For one thing, writing migration scripts is a drag. For another, it's kind of a point of geek pride to have written the software that runs you site.

The second, and only slightly less pressing, is that I actually still have this application on my resume. And why not? After all, it represents three years of work and tens of thousands of lines of code. So it's a significant accomplishment. Unfortunately, it's also horribly out of date. In other words, it's not such a great example of my current work. In fact, much of the app isn't quite up to my current standards, so I'm going to fix that. Although I am happy to report that, when I was looking through the code the other day, it wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it was going to be. I've seen people get paid to write much, much worse code, so I guess I shouldn't be too hard on myself.

Anyway, in the coming months, I'm going to be slowly updating LnBlog. I'll start with a 1.0.0 release, which will really just be my new starting point - some bug fixes, a few extra features, and killing off support for PHP 4.

To facilitate this, and to ramp up my own software engineering discipline on my personal projects, I've instituted an issue tracking system. You can check it out at http://tracker.skepticats.com/. If you find any bugs or have any feature requests, feel free to create an account and report an issue.

I'll update this site little by little as I get around to it. I have much less time for this than I did when I originally developed LnBlog, so don't look for lots of huge new features or updated documentation. Think frequent incremental releases adding minor features, fixing bugs, and refactoring things. But at least it's better than the project being dead.