I know, I know, you’re waiting with baited (bated?) breath for Bloo version 0.17. You are in a tizzy for the new functionality, the exciting new features, the start of the revolution in Blog Software! [Bill adopts a Darth Vader pose here, at the moment when Vader tells Luke “No. I am your Fathah”.]

. . .

[Bill snaps out of it, doing his best imitation of Keneau Reeves in Parenthood right after he says that great line “You need a license to catch a fish, but they’ll let any blankety blank blank be a father”] Whoa.

Perhaps you are wondering when I will put this code in the public domain so you can join in the efforts!

Actually, my guess is that you don’t care. 🙂 But I did want to let you know that I have been working on 0.17 in tiny time slices here and there. I’m excited about many of the changes, although most will, once again, be “behind the scenes”.

About releasing the code in the public domain: I guess I’m just trying to get a bit more completeness before doing so. For instance, I’ve decided to re-write the security module, because the current security is not very flexy. I have a design and even some coding done. I want to wait until that and a few more fundamentals are done before releasing.

Plus I want to setup a cool wiki too 🙂

Watch me for the changes . . .

Just a quick note – I’ve tweaked the Bloos Riff theme just a bit.

I was starting to really, really dislike how it looked.

(also – 0.17 is coming soon! I’m working on some relatively exciting improvements in the behind-the-scenes areas)

As some of you know, the Thinklings is a blog that I webmaster. It had been down last week but was brought back and converted to WordPress.

There are two other blogs in the Thinklings domain – one, which is still down, is Jared’s Mysterium Tremendum (coming up soon, Rod – don’t lose hope!). The other is Katherine’s Blog, which I have converted to Bloo. Bloo version 0.17a, to be exact. This is basically the version I’m running here, with a slight modification on how settings are loaded. I will be upgrading both blogs to 0.17 proper when I get it done.

I haven’t, um, exactly communicated this new development to Katherine yet. 🙂 But she’s a good friend and hopefully will be ok with me using her as a guinea pig.

The expansion of Bloo across the blogosphere has begun! [Bill adopts a Darth Vader pose . . . ]

Bloo version 0.16 has just been deployed!

This release concentrates exclusively on look and feel, which you may have noticed. In this release I have implemented the use of Cascaded Themes. If you’re seeing the default theme right now, you are looking at what I call “Bloo’s Riff”. There are two other themes available – “Bloo Classic” and “Blue”.

And, yes, that is an actual Blues scale – in “B” of course – being played on my venerable Guild dreadnought. 🙂

You can select a theme from the new ThemeDropDown SnapOn (“Select Theme”) located in the left navbar (for Bloo’s Riff) or in the right navbar for either Bloo Classic or Blue.

If you select a theme Bloo will store it in a cookie and reuse it next time.

These themes all “cascade” from a private theme called Bloo Base. In addition, you may notice that Blue and Bloo Classic look pretty much identical, with a bit of color and font finagling. Blue really is just a simple theme that cascades off of Bloo Classic and just does some tweaking of the style sheet.

Speaking of style sheets, one thing to realize about these themes is that they are far more than CSS changes. You can change as much or as little of the look and feel of a page with a theme as you desire and, if designed right, you should be able to cascade off other themes if you just want to make a few small changes, rather than having to create an entire new theme off a cloned and tweaked version.

I will be publishing the spec for this soon (“soon” being a relative term 🙂 with the ulterior motive that perhaps I can get one or more of my many (heh) readers to create a new theme or two for this blog. Feeling artistic and wanting to take part in the Bloo experience? This will be your chance (provided I get that spec created!).

Well, that’s it for 0.16. I wanted to keep this one focused. 0.17 will branch off into some other new features, and hopefully will be coming out soon.

Watch me for the changes . . .

If you don’t have an inner-geek you can skip this post.

I’ve been working on Themes in this release. Got a decent amount of work done this weekend, although I’m still fretting through the best way to organize the code.

Bloo 0.16 (hopefully to come out in the next week) will include Cascaded Themes. A “theme” controlls the look and feel of a user interface – they are also referred to more generically as “skins”. Often times on blogs or other sites the skins are controlled simply by changing out the CSS. A good example of this are the skins on Thinklings. While this is easy to do, it is limiting.

Themes are a somewhat WordPressy concept and are more full-featured than just finagling with the CSS. Themes can alter every aspect of a page if they so desire. WordPress accomplishes this by allowing you to place your page templates in a theme directory and select the theme. There are a specified number of templates you can place there, and they have to be named a certain way.

The Cascading Themes coming in Bloo 0.16 take this a bit further. No longer are you limited in what you can control – a Theme can include not just templates but new SnapOns (what’s a SnapOn? Um, I’m working on the docs for that – so I’ll ‘splain later 🙂 and you can have as many package files as you want to control as many aspects of the blog’s look and feel as desired. And – here’s the cool part – a theme can “cascade” from another theme. In other words, say that you have a certain number of elements that every theme for your blog will include (such as the blogroll, About message, etc). You can place these elements in a base theme and then cascade the other themes off of that, as many levels as you want.

I’ve got this working in my development blog – it was actually not much work because of how Phoo and Bloo are already structured. I’ve been very pleased, if I do say so meself, with the way the structure of this software lends itself to enhancement.

I have a few more details to work out, such as whether or not to cascade the CSS specs – in other words, whether to combine the CSS for the base theme with the CSS for the cascaded theme. I’m thinking through that issue now and leaning “yes”

But bottom line, I’m doing a major engineer’s victory dance at the stokedness of this all. It will make more sense when I release it with the look you’re seeing now (this theme is called “Blue”) along with the older “Classic” theme and a new theme I’ve designed called “Bloo’s Riff”. I’ll also include the ThemeSelector SnapOn so that you can choose the look that best fits your mood when looking at Out of the Bloo.

And if I do this right I’ll actually, for the first time, publish the spec for how to create a theme and open it up for any of you who have an artistic bent and want to submit a new theme for the blog. That will be very cool if I get any takers on that.

Hopefully 0.16 comes out in a week or so. Watch me for the changes . . .

Well, finally!

For those of you who care, this might be somewhat anticlimactic. But I have released Bloo version 0.15. This release took a long time because, um, I quit working on it this summer. Summer was so incredibly crazy, it had to fall by the wayside. But I’m back!

Here are the major changes. Many of them are internal so they won’t be that exciting to you.

• Created a Menu SnapOn (in the admin area, so none of you can see it)
• Fixed (I hope) the Pinger interface so my weblogs pings will actually start “taking”
• Did a lot of internal cleanup
• Some reformatting (as you may have noticed). Themes are coming soon!
• Added Trackback!
• Now when I get a comment on this blog Bloo sends me an email.
• Added a system log that I can look at to see helpful messages, etc.

Well, that’s about it. The “Did a lot of internal cleanup” part was pretty huge. Not because the code was messy, but mainly just because I came up with better ways of organizing it.

I hope to not go three months until 0.16 is released.

Watch me for the changes . . .

Yes. Eventually.

I realized a few weeks ago that I had to put some of my coding efforts on the back-burner, due to the heightened activity of the summer, and a lot of events, people, and efforts that are in line before this little project of mine. I am nearly done with Bloo v 0.15, but it may be awhile before it emerges.

Not that anyone’s exactly waiting with bated (baited? Never got that straight) breath . . . 🙂

In case any of you were wondering if I’m ever going to put out the next version of this software. . .

I’ve been working on version 0.15 off and on over the last few weeks, mainly in little snatches. It’s been a busy time.

This version maintains the slow progress curve I’ve been following – it will have some better stuff “behind the curtains”, will fix a few bugs, and will greatly improve the admin sections you don’t see. It will also (hopefully) include trackback and some other nice SnapOns on the front end.

Regarding comments spam: I’m working through some ideas about how to “recognize” spam when it hits. I’m tired of playing the chase game – bans, blacklists, etc. I’m going to go down a different road in the spam battle, with the hope that we can come up with something that will eradicate most spam without having to a) spend lots of time constantly maintaining blacklists and b) without punishing all the good commenters. My philosophy is that real commenters should not have to go through extra steps to leave a comment. I do realize that often that’s unavoidable, unfortunately.

Many of you may have good ideas on this – if so, please let me know what they are. As I mentioned, I am toying with some ideas of my own regarding recognizing spam, and will hopefully be implementing some of them soon. If any of you have been working through this issue as well and would like to collaborate, don’t be bashful.

‘night all 🙂

Well, I have finally completed version 0.14 of Bloo, and it is currently powering the blog.

Some notes: This version represents quite a step-up in the Bloo software, even though most of the changes are behind-the-scenes type modifications. For those of you with an inner geek, I have moved all the Bloo SnapOns and Overlays into individual “packages” (Java style) that load dynamically. In other words, to add a new SnapOn to the Bloo system you can just create it based on the SnapOn API (still being finalized so I don’t have the docs yet) and place it in a package file in the packages subfolder. Once this is done, the SnapOn will load dynamically, and if you, for instance, reference it in the Overlay or containing SnapOn that controls part of a page, voila, it is now a part of Bloo. I’m geeking out over this. Future releases will allow for the dynamic, non-destructive modification of Overlays, which will allow the blog administrator to change the appearance of their Blog – in all its aspects – online and dynamically. I say “non-destructive” as I plan to build in the ability to always get back to previous versions of the blog’s appearance. Many blogs allow the user to modify a few templates, this plan should be like that, except on steroids.

And – eventually – I will add the ability to define a new SnapOn on-line and dynamically. That will be pretty cool . . .

By way of review: the term “Overlay” refers to a construct used in Phoo/Bloo which represents an interface, either to a database or to the web front-end. For instance, the post you’re looking at is defined/formatted by an Overlay. So is the Bible verse now appearing in right sidebar. The term “SnapOn” refers to the smart objects that populate Overlays. For instance, the overlay that formats this post is contained in and populated by the PostDisplay SnapOn. SnapOns contain overlays, which can contain embedded SnapOns, and so on.

Well, enough of that kind of talk 🙂 – below are the major new features introduced in this release:

• Code Organization – Created the current concept of the SnapOn “package”, as described above
• List Management – again, not something the casual reader has access to. But I’ve implemented a set of SnapOns that allow one to create and manage lists. For instance, the Bloogroll in the right sidebar is now a display of a List (before it was just a static overlay). This is a pretty important feature, since once you have the ability to create lists there are all sorts of pieces of information – both visible and behind the scenes – that can live inside a list
• A new Weblogs Pinger. Not being happy with my pingomatic pinger (which doesn’t seem to work very well) I’ve re-written the pinger SnapOn and I’m now pinging other services (weblogs, technorati, blogrolling, etc) – we’ll see if this improves my pinging luck. I’m not holding my breath (I feel like I’m missing something here)
• Small formatting changes – so, tell me, how much do you hate the new textured background in the sidebars and date header?
• Did some slight cleanup on the RSS (that probably no one will notice)
• Added the SnapOnDescriptor class – giving the developer th ability to create SnapOns that are self-documenting
• Improved the error-rendering features of the blog
• Added the “Daily Passage” SnapOn – this is retrieved from the RSS feed on the excellent English Standard Version website

That’s it! Version 0.15 will be coming out . . . eventually.

Watch me for the changes . . .

Just a quick update – I have been working pretty diligently on the next release of Bloo – I hope to release it this weekend if possible.

It will contain a lot of internal enhancements – in other words, it may not be immediately obvious to the casual observer what the new version actually “improves” over the previous one! But, for what it’s worth, I’m pretty excited about the enhancements I’ve been working on. They will allow for a much more flexible, extensible and nimble system.

I also intend to start posting on some of the code constructs in Bloo, for those of you with an inner geek.

Coming soon . . .

Update 4/17/05: “soon” is one of those relative words – one of the sites I webmaster had a bit of a meltdown this weekend, and it was a busy weekend anyway. So I didn’t make much progress. Of course, as my better half has reminded me, it’s not like there are people clamoring for the new version 🙂