Iron Blogger Update

Tags: programming

This one is slightly meta. Blogging about software about blogging.

A few of us read about this Iron Blogger thing, and we decided we’d give it a go. I downloaded the provided software, poked around a bit, and thought I’d try to make something that non-technical folks could use just as easily.

I didn’t even link to the work in progress last week, as it was pretty terrible. I was able to manually configure our group, only to have multiple timezone issues bite us when processing posts.

In the past week I was able to steal away enough time to do the following:

During the upcoming week I’d like to tackle the following:

  • Back fill some decent testing. The commit log is downright shameful in this regard.
  • Clean up the default template a bit - lots of default links that don’t work.
  • Provide clear links to Atom feeds and OPML downloads.
  • Allow people to sign up. Right now it’s a read only web app, and thus kinda lame.

Once it’s respectably working, I’d also like to reach out to Benjamin Mako Hill to see if he has any input on licensing. I’m heavily borrowing concepts from his Iron Blogger repo, so I’d like to respect his wishes with regard to licensing. Judging from his other work, I’m guessing it’ll land somewhere in the GPL family.

With all of that preamble out of the way, feel free to check out our progress so far: