Today I was inspired by extisp.icio.us and Joh. Give extisp.icio.us a try - you can try my username if you don't have one. It's "casey". Wow. Pretty cool, huh? The idea is simple and the result is a nice visualization that turns a bunch of small bits into a glanceable summary. Thse started me thinking about doing a similar thing with my posts or my referrer logs...
I use Blosxom (pronounced "blossom") to create my blog. Blosxom is a small and elegant piece of Perl that renders my pages by using a few templates, a directory tree of plain text posts, and a couple plugins. I started thinking about how I could hack up the plugin that generates the category part of my sidebar to also generate a category summary file that I could use to generate an extisp.icio.us clone for my blog. Something like:
art:8 art:books:5 art:comics:1could be parsed and turned into a nice DHTML visualization by a custom Blosxom plugin or a (less zen-like) PHP page.
Hmm.. This would work fine for a categories visualization but it got me thinking about how my posts are not easy to summarize or cross-reference because they are just stored as text files in a normal directory tree. If I were to write a program that walked through my entries and indexed them in a MySQL database then I'd have a lot more flexibility. Imagine the cool tricks that could be done if I had a nicely designed database which contained categories, entries, external links to my entries (referrers), internal links to my entries (related posts or cross references) an maybe even an index of images which I have posted. So many possibilities... Every entry could have a sidebar or something which let the user know about other related entries as well as sites which link to it from the outside. I could create cool visualizations to show the relationships between referrers and categories or a multitude of other things. Plus it could be a chance to practice Python.
This is probably not the Blosxom way. Also, I will have written a good chunk of a blogging system anyway. Maybe this isn't such a bad thing... I don't want to feel restricted by my choice of blogging software. Blosxom is very cool but I feel a little boxed in sometimes because I can't just hack out a PHP page to extend my site... Ugh. I don't know. I'm still happy with Blosxom but I'd like a little more flexibility. I think I'll work on my SQL indexing idea and then see where things go from there.
