Subject: Nukumi
Date: Fri, 28 May 2004 14:16:28 +0200
Category: Nukumi

During the last two days, I've been writing Nukumi, my new weblog
system.

So far, "chris blogs" has been generated by a bunch of ruby scripts,
Makefiles and XSLT stylesheets. This was by no means bad; it was very
effective and just worked. But it also was very brainless. I had no
way to do "real" permalinks, and the archive support I added recently
was a kludge.

Therefore, I have been dropping the Makefile stuff and replaced it
with some clever script. The pages are still generated with XSLT,
because it's the easiest way to get multiple output formats (so far,
XHTML, RSS and Atom) from a single source.

However, the new system is much more flexible at this. While the only
script, dubbed `xml2entries.rb` as you may notice, just outputted the
last 15 entries (or all of them, if supplied the `--archive`
parameter), into `xsltproc`, the new one supports *multiple views* of
the same entry base.

My configuration code so far is:

	#        Extension Stylesheet         Views
	n.flavor "html",   "xml2xhtml.xsl",   :ALL
	n.flavor "rss",    "xml2rss.xsl",     :front
	n.flavor "atom",   "xml2atom.xsl",    :front
	
First, we define several flavors (term stolen from Blosxom) for the
different output formats.

The second part is more interesting, however:

	#        Name      Prefix      Hashfunc
	n.view   :archive, "archive-", proc { |e,i| e.time.strftime("%Y-%m") }
	n.view   :daily,   "entry-",   proc { |e,i|
	  e.time.strftime("%Y-%m-%d-") + \
	    e.header["Subject"].downcase.
	    gsub(/[^a-z]/, '_').squeeze('_')
	}
	n.view   :front,   "index",    proc { |e,i|
 	                                        i < FRONT_LENGTH ? "" : nil
	                                    }

The Hashfunc maps every entry onto a string which they get grouped by.
The first entry just generates archives for each different month, that
is `2004-05`, `2004-04` etc.

The second one generates a permalink file for each entry of the form
`2004-03-27-kurt_cobain_jokes`, providing some context to the person
coming from an external page.

Finally, it generates the `index` page (inclusive feeds in RSS and Atom)
for all entries appearing before `FRONT_LENGTH`.

All these views get generated in each defined flavor into a file which
has the flavor extension appended.

Note that all this is very efficient: Only the files which are new
or would get changed (i.e. modification time of any entry in the file
is newer than the entry itself) get generated anew.

Nukumi, which has its name from the japanese word for "warmth" (which
was missing to the Makefile approach... :-)), works already very nicely,
though I spend only about 5 hours coding it. I'll relase it when I'm
back from holidays.

**I'll be away for the next week till Sunday, and not be able to blog during that period.**

NP: Beatsteaks---Big Attack