LnBlog

If you're reading this in a web browser (as opposed to an RSS aggregator), then you're looking at what will eventually become the next release of LnBlog. I uploaded the latest code last night and I'm playing with it now. There's still lots of work to do, but, hey - this is only the 0.3 release.

Most of the changes areactually visible on this page, in some form. You'll notice that each most now displays the name of the author, for starters. This includes a real name (or username), e-mail address, and a homepage, as well as e-mail notification on comments, which I haven't actually tried yet. There's also a TrackBack ping URL and a form for users to send TrackBack pings to other blogs. I still need to play with that a little, though.

I've added a new theme called Tux Ice, which I'm using for LinLog. That, also, still needs some work, but I think I like it better than the Skepticats theme.

Most of the other changes aren't too big. I made some of the HTML more semantic, added some images for the RSS feed links, and added a link on the month archive pages to show all the entries on one screen. The last one is a nice feature for people who browse from work - you can still read all the entries, but there are fewer of those incriminating log entries in the corporate firewall. ;)

If all goes well, the next release will be in about a week or two. If not, then who knows. I just don't want to rush it this time, though, because I always screw something up when I push for an artificial release date.

I think I've pretty much finished all the new functionality for version 0.3.0. I'll be installing it on the web server this weekend to test it and, with any luck, releasing it not too long after that.

There will be a whole lot of changes in the next release. First, I've added a basic user account system with simple access control. This makes it possible for a small group of people to collaborate on a weblog without all sharing one login. Readers will be able to identify and contact each author individually. It also serves to identify logged-in blog authors in the comments, which is nice. The addition of e-mail information also allowed me to add support for e-mail notification of new comments.

The second bgi feature is that I finally added basic TrackBack support. On second reading, it turns out that the TrackBack specification is pretty simple. To receive pings, all you need to do is process an HTTP POST request. This is trivial in PHP. Likewise, sending pings is pretty simple. For now, I just added a form that can be filled out and submitted to send a ping. I implemented an automatic ping mechanism, but I haven't tested it yet and I'm not sure how much of an excerpt (if any) should be sent by default.

Last, I'm trying to add a new theme. Of course, it still looks a lot like the other themes, but will hopefully be somewhat nicer to look at. I finally decided that the skepticats theme sucks and that I'd like to use something different for LinLog. Hopefully I'll be able to make something that looks pretty and goes with a picture of a penguin. ;)