encoded notions

Gee, I suppose that if I am bent on creating a blog, I should at least update it from time to time. I guess I have a decent excuse for not visibly touching the website since my first “real” posting: I’ve been in Orchid hack mode.

I think that in the past week, I’ve rewritten the same 100 KB of perl code about 5 times. “Why so many times?” you may ask. I didn’t originally plan on spending this much time bit-frobbing, but after each full or partial incarnation of the code base, I just haven’t felt that the end result was elegant enough for my standards.

Interestingly enough, it appears as though the code that I heavily forked—Blosxom—has hit version 2.0. I read through the changes (namely the new plugin interface), learned the relevant perl syntax/keywords/function-calls to perform roughly the same thing in Orchid, and took a hammer to my code base. Now I have almost everything that isn’t essential to the core in separate plugins :+).

Right after that change, I felt the urge to give XML a test drive on the links page to speed up page-rendering time (apparently the blosxom idea of storing everything in nested folders doesn’t work very well for 3 line files that represent URLs). It seems as though I now grasp a hefty portion of XML, DTD, expat, and the way that Perl can parse XML. Since the rewrite of the links-mode for Orchid yielded a load time that was almost 1/3 of the original load-time, I am currently in the process of dropping most of the directory structure idea in favor of several scattered XML files throughout my data folder on the server.

Well, I think I’ve wasted enough time blogging another chapter of this quest for one day.