It sure doesn’t sound like much, does it? What it is, however, is the API which allows the discovery of all the categories on compliant ‘blogs.

Which means it should be quite easy to hack into gnome-blog-poster’s MetaWeblog.py protocol library doesn’t it?

Well, yes, it probably does if you’re a real programmer. I, however, am a systems jock; which, traditionally, certainly doesn’t mean I cannot program my way out of a for loop — even we have heard of exits, you know — but it does mean that when I program I do it on my terms.

And my terms never before required me to do pyGTK programming, okay. So stop the whining already… I’ll get to it. That’s the lovely thing about being a *nix systems geek. We get to program stuff on our term to scratch our itches. You want somebody to program off a spec? Go hire a professional.

On a — even more — positive note, I enabled (it was way too easy to be called hacking it in) spell-checking in the applet version of “gnome-blog-poster”. In all, quite elegantly done, Mr Nickell…

I am also considering disabling the HTML-ifying of posts by gnome-blog-poster; at least as a posting-time option. No, I haven’t lost what little is left of my senses; I just really like Markdown…

FC4 test 2, which I updated to, has managed to impress me quite a bit so far. ‘cepting that I had to compile Galeon, my preferred browser, a couple of times — FC4 is still a moving target, so that’s to be expected — most of my apps are either in extras or installed easily from FC3.

I’ve also installed the Blog GNOME applet, so hopefully that will encourage/ drive/ allow me to update the blog more frequently. It’s supposed to be my journal dammit. Journals mean absolutely squat if you don’t use them…

And while I’m on the topic (“Which one?” I hear you snigger…) Fedora Extras rock! Of course, I’d think they rock even more if they had Galeon in the repository, but I’m supposed to be a geek, so I surmise they thought I had to do something on my own.

In spite of its obnoxiously grandiose name — finding new TLA’s for a project can be a bit of a bitch — I actually had some valid reasons for this little project.

The first of which is that after finally getting my grubby mitts on WordPress 1.3 Alpha I resolved to get to grips with both the normal WordPress Template and with the New Extensions. No better way than to actually go implement it, I thought. Much to the dismay of my fiancée, I’ll add, since it meant she got to see me very little over the weekend — basically only when she managed to lure me out of the study with the smell of food…

What added to my woes were the fact that, since I’m an avowed Unix geek, I would not generate HTML or CSS to any standard but W3C. MS and their estimated bezillian percent shareholding be damned. Fortunately, then, I recalled Dean Edwards’ IE7 script set, an attempt to get Microsoft’s IE to do “the sane thing(tm)”. Well, as much as that would be possible, when all is said… Adding that little Java Script resolved quite a couple of CSS concerns, which let me get the look I desired. And it even mostly works on the Monopoly Browser.

Now I have a template which generates near valid XHTML (the sole current exception being the hack to make the header selectable, something I’ll fix soon) and generates valid CSS. Not too shabby, Nige…

Which brings me to the second reason: I needed a Template and CSS combination devoid of all the political wrangling and badmouthing that seems to have been endemic in the WordPress community.

This is the result. Now for a wee bit of tuning, and it might actually become acceptable… :-)

At least it has been an interesting trip:

1. I’ve gotten to know PHP a lot better,
2. I’ve found the Get Custom Field Values plugin for WordPress and am having a great deal of fun with it,
3. I also, quite by accident as it were, stumbled across Alex Kings’s WP Style Switcher; something you’ll note at the bottom of my Menu section. I had to hack it a bit, though, to get it to not display the colon after the ‘Style’,
4. I’m re-learning why, exactly, I love CSS so much.
5. Quicktags and I are becoming very friendly, especially after I hacked the quicktags.js file to allow <br /> tags…

The cost to it all has, of course, been time. It’s not something I complain too much about — I only ever complain about the view when I go through the Karoo, a semi-arid stretch of South Africa inland of the Mountains in Southern Cape, nothing happens in the Karoo — since it has been fairly diverting.

Yeah, I know. Geeks. We find the damndest things diverting… ;-)