Bit by Bit, I give birth to an the elements of an ugly baby renderer
Well in my hour of "free programming" last night (think of your child's "free play" time in nursery school and it'll make sense. Before I had to get back to writing a proposal for a six figure Open Source project for a local charity (astonishingly enough they are totally fine with moving away from Microsoft, even willing to move to MySQL or Postgres), I was able to do the following work on my silly rendering concept:
- Decide not to use XSLT. Why? Because sabolotron, the normal PHP xslt tool, isn't a) widely installed b) is a bitch to install as far as I can learn.
- Wrote a test bed ui that doesn't look bad (because blog stuff should look good).
- Wrote the JavaScript, CSS and DHTML model for expand / collapse.
- Created UserLand style >closed, >open and UpArrow gif icons.
- Wrote the Url open / close stuff (not much here) for pulling an IO off the net.
- Started to think about a IO "Identity Card" which could give elements of the user's identity in a pop window including:
- dig picture (nice to collaborate when you can see who they are)
- Last update date
- Link to home page
- Name
- IM addresses?
- Link to blog
- Email contact thru userland's back end anonymous mailer
- Left off at the tree walker. I'm writing (sigh) proposals much of today. Anyone want to help?
Note: I say "ugly" because, for me, all my early code is ugly. It's kind of an afterbirth thing in reverse. Starts ugly and, perhaps, becomes pretty but it usually works.
Silly / Stupid Idea? The more I think about this, the more I think that we could, strangely but interestingly, tie rendering in with collaboration. This is the early germ of an idea and, it's early (6 am and pre caffeine), but it seems that if I'm building an IO w/ a set of keywords, I'd like to know about other IOs w/ the same keywords. Can the renderer efficiently when it's renderering, say Phil's IO, shoot back to a DB a set of keywords per node? This could, arguably, require that huge Oracle server in the sky or could it be done as a distributed db? Same approach as we're talking about here with the renderer? What's the time frequency on IO updates? Do I find out two weeks later that Phil was working on something that I'm now done with? How do you attain the immediacy of IM in IO? What if you tied it into a subset of all IO's that matched your Navigator Links? I.E. your navigator links are a mirror of what you're interested in in terms of a blog. What about using those as a monitoring matrix for IOs that might be consonant with your own?
Bizarre. In one post, I managed to post to five categories: Home, KM, PHP, Radio, Search Stuff. New for me.
Need caffeine. Clearly. Write the renderer first (actually write proposals now).
5:51:42 AM 
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