Archive for 2001

Last week’s

A List Apart shows how to set up stylesheet switching on your

site. Some good technique and theory, and generally a better

approach then my way :-)

I just added an option to Loggerhead to have it automatically ping

Weblogs.com when you add

a new log entry. This is a test post.

Update: It works.

Wasn’t it just the other day I said I didn’t like Flash because

there weren’t any open source develpment tools to work with it?

I was

title='Ming, a free library for generating Flash files'>wrong.

Lately I’ve been doing some research on free development tools

for

Windows. There are

a couple of reasons for this. First, because

I’d like to see the software I write run on multiple

platforms, and

Windows is certainly an important step in that direction (my

default platform being, of course,

Linux). Second, because I’m currently working for a client

that uses Windows almost exclusively, and I’d like to be able to

borrow some of the tools that I’m used to using for Linux development.

Here’s what I’ve come up with so far:

• Python runs great on Windows,

  and even lets you do cool Windows-specific things like build COM objects

  in 100% pure Python, without compiling. If you’re interested, there’s an

  exellent O’Reilly

  book on the subject. And there’s a chapter on working with COM

  available for free.

• GTK, the toolkit with which many Linux

  applications such as the Gimp are built,

  is available for windows with

  Python bindings. You can even design your interface with

  Glade, a very nice interface designer (although the Glade-Python bindings

  for windows are really hard to find in compliled form. It took me forever to find

  a site that had them, and then I lost the URL).

  I used Python, Glade, and GTK to write

  Loggerhead, the program I use to maintain the news on this site, and I’m happy

  to report that (after some tweaking) it runs perfectly on both Linux and Windows.

• The problem with GTK apps is that they don’t look like standard Windows software.

  So I’m thinking of switching to wxPython.

  This is a set of Python libraries that creates interfaces using a desktop environment’s

  native toolkit, so it looks just like other applications written for that platform.

  On Windows, wxPython apps look like other Windows apps. On Linux, they look like

  other GTK apps (GTK is used under the hood). It’s pretty neat stuff, and it works.

  This is probably what I’ll use for future GUI projects.

• Of course, I don’t expect Windows users to actually try out my software

  unless it’s all packaged up in a nice self-installing .exe. And while I haven’t built

  any installer packages yet, there are a couple of promising open source options.

  From the boys at Nullsoft, there’s

  the popular NSIS. Another

  very nice looking (and, from what I’ve seen, less intimidating) installer package

  is Inno Setup,

  from Jordan Russell.

Based on what I’ve seen so far, I feel very comfortable that I’ll be able to develop

for Windows using nothing but freely available, open source software. I save

the cost of Visual

Studio, and my code remains platform independent. Nice.

Oh, and Source Forge currently lists

5042 open source projects in its Windows section.

Happy coding!

I was just looking back through some old news postings, and noticed

that my original estimated release date for Loggerhead 0.1 was the

middle of August. Oh well. I guess part of the fun of writing software

for your own use is that the deadlines are all in your head.

I’m not a big fan of Flash.

It’s a proprietary format that doesn’t

integrate well with the rest of the web. As a developer, there’s very

little I can with it that doesn’t require me to send a big fat check to

Macromedia first. And the linux version

is slow and

CPU intensive.

So it’s rare for me to get really excited about anything done in flash. But

these games and demos are just

amazing. Beautiful work.

Version 0.1 of Loggerhead, my web logging application, is now available for

download in the just-added Projects

section.

I’m going live with a somewhat buggy implementation of site theming.

You should be able to choose a theme from the select box in the upper

right hand corner of the page and have it follow you around. It’s all

javascript, and currently has only been tested on Mozilla and IE6,

although it should also work on IE 4 and 5, and maybe (but not likely)

Netscape 4.

TODO: Make select list show current theme,

make cookies persist between sessions,

figure out why the selected stylesheet isn’t loading on IE5/Mac

and Netscape6/Mac.

Update: In the interests of keeping things simple and

fairly cross-browser, I’ve gotten rid of my logo image. Now the

‘Abe Fettig’ at the top of the page is just text. Lightweight,

cross-browser, and themeable.

Updates on my web logging program:

• I’ve decided on a name for it: Loggerhead.

  You know, like the

  turtle.

  Hopefully that qualifies as fun-yet-descriptive.

• As you can see from my post below, as well as

  this screenshot,

  Loggerhead is cross-platform! Using Python and GTK,

  it runs on Linux and Windows, and presumably Mac OS X.

However, it’s still incompete and unstable at this point, so I’m not

going to go through the effort of packaging it for distribution.

However, if you know Python and you’d be interested in trying

out the code for purposes of curiosity / testing / improving, let

me know. I’ll be glad to send you a tarball.

I’m trying to get my web logging app to run on windows, and this

is my first test message.