PowerBlogs.Com Development

I've just finished and uploaded the scheduled posting code. It is now possible to schedule posts for publishing at an arbitrary future date.

I've taken advantage of the save-for-later code, so that a post which is scheduled to be published is merely saved for later with a schedule for its posting made. This way one just uses the regular ability to edit saved posts to edit scheduled posts (plus canceling a post just means deleting it from the saved posts).

I also have to give credit to Date::Manip for allowing me to accept dates in arbitrary formats like "Next thursday at 5am". For anyone who's a perl programmer, Date::Manip is a fabulous module if you need to take a date from a user (as the author himself says, though, it's far too slow for repetative parsing, such as in a tight loop).

Well, fun is the wrong word. Testing is rather a PITA, but it's one of those strange activities where you hope that it's going to be boring.

In this case, I discovered a bug which would affect hostnames that have numbers in them. I think that this came from a mixup in policy — originally I wasn't going to support hostnames with numbers but then I decided to — but anyway, it was screwing up the generation of archives (none of the beta accounts have numbers in them).

Well, all's well that ends well, especially when it's during the testing phase rather than the live phase. :-)

And, pleasingly, once again when I find a bug, it's not the sort that would cause a loss of data, just an inconvenience until it's fixed. I'm very pleased with the backend architecture so far. It's proved very resilient against data loss. In fact, [and I say this knocking on wood], I haven't seen a case of data loss yet as a result of a bug. Things are looking good.

The code to accept payments and automatically create accounts is almost ready. This is a really exciting time.