the power of 0ne

Bryan Bell points out a serious problem with Manila's use of external style sheets, and the linkToStylesheet macro in particular.

This one is really nasty, the external style sheet should be staticly rendered and the linkToStyleSheet should recognize that and point to the static file.

Now if Userland had a process for accepting contributor code any Manila developer could write a fix for this bug in a few minutes. Combined with the nightly update feature, the bug could be squashed in a couple of days.

Playing around with the theme in Radio, adding a blogroll.

Ok here's a quick and dirty analysis of the various RPC interfaces i've identified so far.

Blogger API

• Limited functionality. (-)
  
• Does not support the 'Title' and automatically inserts "Blogger News Item" as the title, (-)
  
• No support for categories. (-)
  

Metaweblog API

• Supports title, description, url and category. (+)
  
• Supports empty title and desciption. (+)
  
• Also supported by MT. (+)
  

Manila RPC

• Supports title, description, url and category. (+)
  
• Supports empty title and desciption. (+)
  
• Only supports Manila. (-)
• Possible hack for getting the correct post time (+)
  

Based on the above, both the Manila RPC and the Metaweblog API have the basic functionality to transfer all Radio posts to a Manila site. Unfortunately they do not provide a way to specify post time so the date/time information of the post would be lost.

The Manila RPC does however contain a handler that allows you to set the timezone, it may be possible to set this to an outrageous negative value to trick manila into backposting for us.

None of the interfaces provide a method for transfering trackback information about the post, nor is there a method to transfer the comments. Both of these issues could be overcome by hardcoding the comment and trackback links into the body of the post.

Next step is to test the timezone hack, if it works the Manila RPC seems to be the way to go, if it doesn't why not use the Metaweblog API and get automatic support for MT aswell?

Steve just made an interesting post showing some code that Dave wrote to upload pictures to a Manila site.

Looks like the ESA is planning to go to Mars! Following the recent annnouncement from US President Bush this is truly great news. Competition with the Russians is what allowed the human race to really push the envelope and land on the moon in 1969, when it truly was bleeding edge. Hopefully this is just what is needed to get the public interested in space again.