Thanks to RapidWeaver for deleting my custom template again during an update I did not have time to post during June, sorry for that. In fact, I’m not sure which one is at fault here: MacOSX or RapidWeaver. During the initial creation of this blog, I made a custom template from an existing template called Interslice to add support for Google Adsense and to clean it up a bit to my personal taste.
The pain here is that RapidWeaver stores the templates inside its own application bundle, rather than in a separate folder. (For those not in the know, application bundles are just folders with a very specific structure, an “.app” extension and a custom icon).

Furthermore, when updating RapidWeaver, it downloads a new application bundle as a dmg file, automounts it and opens the folder, just like when you want to install a new program. Many apps update the existing bundle in the Applications folder instead and let the application automatically restart.
So when you update, you perform the same procedure as during normal installation. This would be fine if MacOSX didn’t completely replace the original application bundle, removing my templates in an unrecoverable fashion; The original bundle is not put in the trashcan, but is unconditionally erased from the harddisk!

This is an old design flaw in MacOS Finder that goes all the way back to MacOS1.0, but Apple has decided to keep this functionality of having the move operation being unrecoverable and atomic. This is the single-most stupid part of MacOSX!
If you are a pure mac user, not having used other platforms much, you will find the behavior quite logical. For the rest of us, it’s highly annoying and a dangerous operation to have in an operating system that normally shines on security and usability, because move means folder merging to us. It also makes it a complete nightmare to merge nested folders, something I do often, so I have to resort to the Terminal or muCommander to do that.

But still, even if a folder is replaced, why doesn’t MacOSX Finder just move the older folder to the trashcan instead of completely deleting it?

Wordpress

I was briefly looking at Wordpress to see if a web based blogging solution would fit me. Indeed Wordpress has a lot of momentum, a lot of plugins, themes and users. There are even applications like MarsEdit that plug in to Wordpress, so you can write posts offline and have them posted when you go online.

But after looking through about a hundred different themes I came to a simple conclusion: They suck. They are pretty to look at, but none of them are practical and the simple ones are too simple (i.e. no plugins allowed). So I went back to RapidWeaver.

This time, code segments should appear correctly! I hope you will like this skin better, because I think it's cooler than the others, so I'm sticking with it. Happy blogging!

I like reading The REBOL Week, because it's a good source of information on what's going on in the REBOL community in general.

BUT, then I read the following under a mention of my TOOLBAR announcement:

By The way, congrats to Henrik for his nice adaptation of the popular REBOL Blog engine which he sure turned into a slick looking page!

I wish that was true, but it's too early to say that. This blog is (still) run with RapidWeaver on a Mac. It's a nice program which is very easy to use and set up a page with, so I can recommend it for beginners. However, RapidWeaver is rather limited in the integration of its pages with REBOL pages. That's why you see primitive links to REBOL style Makedoc2 documents in the Downloads section. Quite disjointed, but it works somewhat for now.

Sometime in the future, I hope I will have time to carry on a new project, which I have temporarily left in November. It's a REBOL based site generator, combining various existing REBOL web page generating tools to a powerful way of describing web pages, using a site map dialect. Early tests show that it's ridiculously fast at generating about 10 pages in 2-3 seconds and you can generate entire websites in 10-20 lines of code. Sometimes REBOL just catches me by surprise at how fast you can do parsing.

What it can do right now:

• 
  
• Set up a website using a sitemap dialect. Everything related to site structure is kept in one little file.
• 
  
• Generator grabs data for the website from anywhere REBOL can read from (other sites, disks, etc.).
• 
  
• Grab plain text documents from various directories, catalog them by directory, process them with a modified Makedoc2 and integrate them into the website, completely skinned and with page navigation. (I think this is currently the most impressive feature )
• 
  
• Placeholder pages.
• 
  
• Full two-level page navigation with an automatically generated horizontal menu.
• 
  
• Banner/presentation pages for projects.
• 
  
• Uniform, tasteful, lightweight and clean skin for all pages.
• 
  
• Can be served with any webserver.
• 
  
• Skinned directory/file lists.
• 
  
• Easily editable skins.
• 
  

These are all static pages, and it works beautifully, but I'm not happy with the functionality of the code generator, as I like to have tools to be as easy to pipeline as possible and flexible enough to fit in most development pipelines. This one isn't just yet.

Then I started work on dynamic pages, but I stumbled upon some difficulties integrating Carl's Blogger script, because it's tuned for CGI, where I use a different approach with webserv.r. I then left the project temporarily to pursue another one.

If someone is making small REBOL scripts to generate web page contents (BSD License only, please), I'd like to know, because, the goal of this project is to create an easy to use complete package for creating rich websites with REBOL. Another goal is to present this as a commercial quality project, so features, reliability and flexibility will be important.

This is how it looks:

Title Page


Makedoc 2 document


Automatically generated Makedoc 2 article list.

That's all I'll be saying about it for now.

Lots of dead links on the download page, and I didn't even notice it! Sorry about that. I'm guessing that this could have been monitored with a tiny REBOL script, but I didn't bother to write one.

I've created an account on Technorati. They say I should put a link on the blog to let their web search engine be able to search my page. So here it is: Technorati Profile

Blogging is actually quite boring when you have nothing to say, isn't it?

Anyhow, LIST-VIEW is at 0.0.48, which was posted about two weeks ago. I'm not going to make a blog post on that, as you can read the history file on it here as always.

I'm working on a pretty big application now that I hope I can begin selling sometime in 2007 or perhaps 2008, so this is taking up my full time now. Of course this application is made in REBOL, which goes to show that even REBOL in its current incarnation is good enough for major applications.

Why will it take so long to make? It's REBOL, isn't it? Well, the thing is I want it done right and that will make things take a long time, designing the GUI, getting details right and thinking up features requires even more time.

In order to begin selling it, I will need to get the REBOL/SDK to make executables. I can't afford it right now, so I'm going to start selling the application to a few locals, who have shown great interest it. They will also work as a "test bed" to see if the application is working as desired. I'm getting lots of help in getting customers from a local salesman, so many thanks to him. This will help me to finance future development and also hopefully to bring up a server that will let me sell the application online, all through a REBOL powered website.

I've thought it out. There's a lot to do, but a plan has been made and I hope I can keep it. This is the few first steps of many, many steps that will make this system grow into something interesting that I hope people will use.

Well, what is it? I'm not going to say yet, but it'll help making certain difficult things very easy, and it's inspired by the Mac platform, although it's primarily going to be a Windows XP program.

Maybe this will turn out to be interesting, and if so, I'll keep blogging about it.