My OS X Programming Blog

I think I’ll finish early today. It was quite easy to add menu items for inserting tags. Using the WebKit, a single line of code gets you a live HTML previewer! Then a split view was generated by only a few clicks in the Interface Builder.

The use of the 300-line FCBlogEditor should not require a lot of explanation: it’s probably easier to read the code to learn how :-). It’s a Cocoa document-based application so it behaves like one. Each document window contains a split view. The upper view for typing and the lower view shows a live preview. The HTML menu shows all the menu commands (and shortcuts) for inserting tags. Commands such as HTML->Bold adds both the opening and closing tags. If text is selected, the added tags enclose the selection and places the cursor after the closing tag. If no text is selected (i.e., the editor is showing an insertion point), the tags are added and the insertion point is placed between them. The commands HTML->Link and HTML->Image work best if the link is on the pasteboard.

FCBlogEditor - an HTML Editor with Syntax Coloring

Thursday November 13, 2003

I’m now typing this blog entry in my brand new HTML editor! I have fleshed out the flex code I was playing with yesterday. The editor now displays HTML code in amazing technicolor as I type. The total lines of code is still less than 200. There just isn't any neater way to write this.

The reason I’m writing this editor is I want one that lets me type often-used tags, like <code>, , etc., and close them in single key strokes. I’ll have to add the code to do this and add a live previewer tomorrow. After it is done, I'll be able to produce my entire blog using only programs I’ve written. I can get back to writing MIDI programs then.

Syntax Coloring As You Type and Using Flex in a Xcode Project!

Wednesday November 12, 2003

I attain programming zen today :-). I have the crucial part of the code for an HTML editor with syntax coloring. And it's only 50 lines long!

How do I get away with that? By using flex to scan and colorize tokens. I discovered today that Xcode will correctly compile and link a project with a .l file in it. The lexical analyzer thus generated can then be used in the project (by calling yylex() as usual).

It's hard to describe how neat this is. I'll just let the project speak for itself. Currently the test program will colorize only the tags , , <html>, and </html> as you type. But since these are defined in lex, more can quite easily be added.

Using FCBlog

Tuesday November 11, 2003

Today I added code to FCBlog for generating a RSS news feed for the blog. As I worked on this, I noticed in my old rss.xml files, BlogMax enters both the title and contents of an entry as descriptions. This must have looked quite strange in a news reader. Therefore if my RSS didn't work before, you may want to try again now.

I tried to validate some of my web pages and I noticed that AppleWorks generates some HTML incorrectly. E.g., it messes up when trying to nest font and anchor tags. So I'm now using the Taco HTML Editor to write my blog entries.

Here's the new version of FCBlog. It's a command line program. So after it's built, put it somewhere along PATH.

To set up a blog, create a directory, say Weblog. Copy into it the templates directory that comes in the FCBlog2 archive. Customize the values in templates/blog-dict.plist. Then in Weblog create a directory for the year, with the four digit year number (say 2003). In the year directory, create one directory for each week that contains blog entries. A week directory is named by the first day (Sunday) of that week, in the form mm-dd (say 11-02, 11-09, etc.). Within the week directory, HTML day files named 0.html, 1.html, 2.html, 3.html, 4.html, 5.html, and 6.html represent entries for Sunday, Monday, ..., Saturday, respectively. So, for example, if I blogged on weekdays in the week of November 2 and on Monday and Tuesday in the week of November 9, my directory structure will look like this:

Weblog/
  2003/
    11-02/
      1.html
      2.html
      3.html
      4.html
      5.html
      image-file-for-one-of-the-day-entries.jpg
      more-image-files-for-other-day-entries.tiff
    11-09/
      1.html
      2.html
  templates/

Image and binary files referenced by the day files go into the same week directory. The HTML file for a day entry must contain the tag <body>. The first string following this tag enclosed in  and  tags is taken to be the title of that entry. Everything that follows up to the </body> tag is taken to be the contents. The first paragraph of the day file must be terminated by a   tag. It is taken as the description of the entry when generating the rss.xml file.

Running FCBlog in a week directory generates the blog page (named index.html) for that week. Running FCBlog with any argument also generates a rss.xml file in the top directory (Weblog).

A index.html file must be created in the top directory with the following contents.

<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Automatic Redirection</TITLE>
<meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="0; url=2003/11-09/index.html">
<script>
window.location = 2003/11-09/index.html;
</script>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<P>This page will automatically redirect.
<P>If this does not work for any reason use the link below:
<P><A HREF="2003/11-09/index.html">2003/11-09/index.html</A>
</BODY>
</HTML>

The links in it must be changed every week.

Then the rss.xml file, the index.html files (both top-level and weekly blog pages), and the image and binary files are uploaded to the web site.

[BTW, the name Fish Creek Blog Builder is appropriate because beavers live along Fish Creek. Get it :-)? ]

Fish Creek Blog Builder!

Monday November 10, 2003

I’ve decided not to use BlogMax/Emacs to write my blog any more. So I wrote FCBlog, a simple blog builder software. It has many advantages over BlogMax:

It is very fast. It takes about a second to rebuild my past 3 months of messages, (excluding time for uploading).
It takes HTML day entries as input. That means I can now write entries in Appleworks and then export them, or write HTML directly for stuffs too difficult for Appleworks.
The day files, images, and binaries for each week reside in one directory so the directory structure for the blog is very clean.
FCBlog generates a page per week. The blog is now much easier to browse.
Navigation is improved. One can jump immediately to any day or week within the month from any page. Of course there are also links to the previous and following months.
It’s simple (less than 300 lines!) and can be easily changed and extended.

It’s a good weekend of work! I spent most of today converting my blog to this new format. I’ll describe how to use it tomorrow. I still need to write the code to generate the RSS file, but that should be quite simple.

So the entire site you’re now seeing is generated by FCBlog, Appleworks, TextEdit, and nothing else. Neat huh?

November 2003
Sun	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat
						1	•
2	3	4	5	6	7	8	•
9	10	11	12	13	14	15	←
16	17	18	19	20	21	22	•
23	24	25	26	27	28	29	•
30							•

Oct Dec

Search this blog with

Lists

Less-Known Facts About Emacs

Emacs Rants

Chinese Restaurants in Calgary

Calgary/Banff Tourist Attractions

C++ Reading List

Science Fiction Series

Top-10 Reason I Stopped Working on Emacs

Top-10 Types of Questions I Get About Emacs

10 Defining Moments as Programmer

Misc

Carbon XEmacs

Emacs for Mac OS X

Created with FCBlog