I am still nurturing the project to knit my own blogging system. As such it would match this twisted limbs as it is were made for them, which, of course, would be the case. This would allow me to do the things that I thought I could do in Pivot, and probably can. But as the last time I tried, I busted everything to such a point that I had to reinstall all, I am not looking forward to trying. (This is of course, the same principal as IKEA furniture: you buy it as it is supposed to do what you need. However, once you attempt to construct the damned thing it goes haywire, has 3 type C screws when you need 5, 7 of type D and you only need 4 and the type F widgets so ressemble the type E ones that you have already worn out the thread on most of them in unscrewing them for the fourteenth time. I used to see a nice bit of furniture in the Habitat catalogues, jump in the car to go to Paris (we lived in Orléans and out of the range of a Habitat at the time), look it over in the shop, and then come back home and make it. A lot easier like that. So I beginning to think that programming is similar.)

Anyway, I had a look at Textile which appeared interesting but a mite over complicated for my needs. And while the syntax is logical it isn’t always my logic. I have just finished writing the PHP code for a reduced set of this, and what do I see at daring fireball but John Gruber’s latest baby—Markdown. Now he has the think down right, which is better than getting the syntax down right like others. Except it is written in Perl, which I left aside yonks ago. And I don’t really want to get out the mental soldering iron to join PHP and Perl along the seams. Nor do I wish to code my tool in Perl. So do I continue (with what I now see is improvable) or do I chuck it out and start a clone of Markdown in PHP?

Never had this problem with furniture..

I have again read through the docs for this Pivot thingy, and still can’t see how to use the different categories (I would rather have liked a different category per page or something). I still don’t understand what the Referrer and the other strange blocks were for (I have since killed these, precisely because of that). Nor do I understand why these show random strange markup at strange random moments. In fact, I’m not even sure what a trackback is {what is a trackback, anyone?}.
So I am doing some serious wondering about digging into my archives and reviving the code that I have. It may not be better but at least (for me) it would be understandable.

Apart from that… Another wonderful day on another wonderful planet.

I have spent some time hacking the style sheets to get this away from the standard “flowered wallpaper” patterns that Pivot uses. I have the front page acceptable except for:

• the calendar—there’s an annoying override for this and my styles get lost…
• apostrophes—may have to hack the php for curly apostrophes instead of these dashes/primes

[update: i switched to Textile and these are a thing of the past—thank you Pivot and Textile!]

• I will see how difficult it is to add a footer
• the different entries need to be better separated.

[update: getting there…]
once I get away from the home page things get really rough, and I will spend some time on that… later.

I will also try and link in some other stuff like old essays, links to the downloadable material, my resume, and other pretty stuff.

But, for the moment, the priority is looking for more aspirin & then to bed.
—
Next day update. Reinstalled Pivot as it went wonky on me. Most annoying. I had used up a loo roll, too many aspirins, much kleenexi… feel horrible and wanted to write, and instead have to telnet all over the place… yuk. double yuk even.]

This is another test to find out what is going on and how. Debugging furiously.

At first I was furious with this Pivot thingy. I had gone to sourceforge and searched for ‘blog’. I wanted a simple thing that ran on PHP, but didn’t use a database. I figured that was real overkill for my needs. [I also have about 80% of a flatfile blogging system here on the iBook, so this had better be easier to install that than finishing 20% of a homegrown system.]

After spending some time insulting the system because I wasn’t able to understand anything, it now seems approachable. I will see if the remaining irritations smooth out, or wrinkle up to such a point that I’ll finish mine.