dive into mark

I started this weblog using Blogger, but was disappointed:

• I hate the web interface, and haven’t found a good way to automate it. I write best in Emacs (sue me, I’m a geek). Writing in a little half-page web form sucks.
• The HTML that is generates for each log entry is not valid. They don’t like closing their tags. I know, nobody cares, but I do. I hand-coded this entire site to be accessible, cross-browser compatible, and standards-compliant, and I’m not about to have Blogger go fucking it up.
• Although you can customize the look of the front page by pasting in your own HTML template, there doesn’t appear to be any way to customize the look of the archive page that it generates. This is a dealbreaker.

So anyway, I wrote a little Python script to do it for me, which I’ll post once I clean it up (and take out the hard-coded passwords :). It’s a hack, but it’s a powerful hack. Given a directory of .log files, it sorts them by date, reads them in, generates a front page with 7 days worth of entries, generates each archive page, and FTPs all of them to my site. Total time: under 3 hours. Number of bugs: heh, I couldn’t even hazard a guess; suffice to say it was not unit-tested.

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