I finally managed to get categories together, thanks to someone named madjo over at the Pivot forums .—Thank you, sir.—This means that rather than being one bleak and long list there are categories and subcategories.

I explain.

Everything gets published on the Journal page. It is posted in standard blog format, that is, most recent at the top and then goes down. Then there are three categories: WRITING, LIFE and ABOUT. The last is just for info about me, and about the navigation, like this post. Usually material that is posted in this last category is not considered ‘news’ and so will not appear on the front page unless, like this post, it is also crossposted in another category.

WRITING lists all my posts in that category. There are four sub-categories: Juliet, Died, Pirates and Stuff. All material posted in one of those categories also gets posted on the WRITING page. Please note that some material may just be posted in the WRITING category. Similarly LIFE has four sub-categories: Home, Work, Rant and System.

Any page can be accessed directly just by using its URL. This would be http://www.thepowerfactory.com/journal/ and then the category name, in lower case, followed by .php.

So, to go to Juliet you would need to type http://www.thepowerfactory.com/journal/juliet.php

Or to go to WRITING, you would need to type http://www.thepowerfactory.com/journal/writing.php

You can also use the RSS or the ATOM feeds (over on the far right). In that case, either you know how, or you don’t. And this isn’t the place to learn. Yet.

I forgot to say that one of the major annoyances of Pivot is that the Textile system (when it works) part only treats the body of the post and not the titles… look at the ugly typography there…

Perhaps I should post a bug ? Although this is perhaps more in the Missing Functionality category, no?

(Look see, another problem… with Textile you can’t have a trailing punctuation ‘comma’, ‘question mark’ on a URL. Small argh.)

I have had another look at the code of the Pivot system. While I’m not as happy with it as with something that I have programmed myself, I have finally understood [Duh!] that I should rebuild all the pages when I make changes. Naively I thought that they propagated themselves. Not true.

Also the Textile system is not that clever… It misses a lot of tags and is very unforgiving. I wonder if I can hack it out to replace it with something else…

I tried to add comments. No go. I tried to look up something in the archive. No go. I tried to put some text in blockquotes. You guessed it. No go.

Look, I’m quite willing to admit that this must be me. That there are lots of people out there happily using Pivot However I’m not one of them. The only thing that is keeping me from getting down and coding is that I should be working on something else. But as that isn’t advancing…