Wrestling with BlogMax
As I’ve ritten yesterday, I found BlogMax to be very close to what I was lloking for in terms of a light and relatively versatile weblog maintenance application. Being tied down to .Mac means that I can forget about setting up anything like MT (but I did not like it very much when tried) or some over blogging tool. Hence, I merely wanted something to help me keep local collection of .html or text files in a nice and proper order,then sync it up to my /Sites dir on the iDisk.
Well, like I said — BlogMax is practically there for my primitive needs, but there are a few gotchas... Here’s my laundry list to see if I can fix in any way:
- It has a very wierd way of setting story titles: you either need to put them up as a comment on the first line of your daily file, or wrap them up inside a name attribute of an <a> tag.
- RSS produced by it is really strange. It would work — not an issue, but it just ain’t pretty. In a nutshell, each <p> becomes a separate <item> in the feed, with the first few characters set as <title>
- Speaking of which — if you are maintaining just a plain text daily entries, with minimal HTML just to get links in, do quoting, emphasising and insert images — beware that a resulting HTML will be very nonompliant with any W3C recommendations. There’ll be tons of minor things, lots of which can at least be partially fixed with proper template tune-up, but many require changes to some prts of the code. My favorite is how <p> tags get inserted: it is just a replace of all double-newlines with a single <p>. Works fine for HTML 3.2 Transitional, but is not very XHTML-ish...
Now, this is not meant to be critical, this is just a list of itmes I’ll try and take a closer look at — maybe my limitted abilities can allow me to fix a few of these; maybe in the process I would learn a little bit of elisp; or maybe I’d just give it up and use Emacs WikiMode instead...
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On an unrelated note, I have tried to make some oatmeal cookies, using Andrew Ki On Choi’s recipe. Very nice, but a bit too sweet to my taste...
