Fallen and Can't Get Up
Alas, PolkaDot has fallen off the Freshmeat main page. I guess I had better make some meaningless changes so I can release a new version.
But 220 folks did look at the Freshmeat entry. (And 138 of them followed the link to the site. That's about 138 more than I expected.)
Initial Release of PolkaDot
PolkaDot is really cheap and easy blogging software. You just dump a couple files in a directory and then dump text files along with them. The software turns them into posts. You can add categories by making sub-directories.
The main info page for PolkaDot contains FAQs and the source code.
Now You're a Real Boy
PolkaDot now has a real live user-base. That's right. This is no longer the only PolkaDot powered blog on the net.
PolkaDot is proud to present the UW-HEP IT Blog!
The what? It's short for "University of Wisconsin High Energy Physics Core Information Technology Blog." How cool is that? The first real PolkaDot user is into High Energy Physics. (I took just enough physics in college to know that Steve the High Energy Physics Guy must be pretty smart.)
Not only is Steve actually using PolkaDot in the real world, he's enhancing the software.
If you've tried paging back to earlier posts, you may have noticed that PolkaDot lets you page back to before the first post. In fact, it'll let you page back as far as you like. (I suppose at some point the variable holding the post number will overflow.) Steve fixed it. Very nicely, too.
He also added some configuration options that were long overdue, like the format of the posted date, whether to provide an RSS feed, and what to call that list-o-links on the right.
These enhancements all fit well into the PolkaDot design philosophy and will be included in the next official release.
Thanks Steve!
PolkaDot Philosophy
Since I mentioned the PolkaDot Philosophy in the previous post, I should expound on what that is:
- Installation means dumping the files on a PHP server. Nothing else. Dump 'em and the blog should work.
- Configuration is all in config.php. This lets folks upgrade to later versions without having to redo their config file.
- Configuration is optional. (People will, of course, at least change things like the blog name. But it needs to work right out of the box. So none of the configuration defaults should prevent an installation from working.)
That's it. That's the PolkaDot Philosophy!
Freshmeat
I guess I should have checked Freshmeat before posting that I had submitted PolkaDot. By the time I posted, it had already been approved as a project.
In submitting it, I learned three things about Freshmeat that I didn't know:
- There's an approval process. They reject things that they deem trivial. (I was a little worried about that requirement.)
- Projects don't have to be open source.
- Projects must run on either the PalmOS or on a Unix-like OS. No Windows-only software allowed.
Of course, it was approved in the wee hours of the morning and had fallen pretty far down the front page by morning.
Freshmeat Submission
I made my first ever project submission to Freshmeat last night . With any luck, the world will soon know of the magic that is PolkaDot!
Posting From a PDA
PolkaDot's use of simple text files means you can post from anything with an FTP client, like your PDA.
(I'm posting this from my PDA.)
