Z Space Blog

Today marks the second full version of Sporkblog, which I've been aiming for since October 19th, 2009! Almost 3 years and 61 commits later, Sporkblog has come a long way. It's a bit easier to work on, for starters. The source is still a bit messy, but the implementation is somewhat correct, and it's not hard to figure out which files are associated with each view. The majority of the time spent between commits was spent thinking about the best way to implement each feature (that is, when life wasn't getting in the way).

So, how far has Sporkblog come in real, "tangible" ways? Well:

• It has an installer, so you don't have to manually setup the database;
• The Atom feed generator works for all three major views instead of just one;
• Commenting actually works;
• There's a site editor, so settings can be modified as needed;
• The templates are built with HTML 5, so it's future-proof for a while and allows for awesome themes

I'm happy to have finally reached the 2.0 goal. There are still plenty of small quirks that need to be worked out, but it's still ready for regular use and hacking.

I've been playing Etrian Odyssey and was looking around for skill trees so I could plan a proper party. Nowhere I looked offered what I was looking for, so I gathered the data and made my own diagrams! After a little sprucing up, it turned into a FAQ.

Etrian Odyssey » Class Skill Trees, ver. 1.1 — updated 2012-08-06

It features fairly easy-to-read diagrams and skill cost highlights so you can plan your skill spreads accordingly. Enjoy.

Dupekill Project Page

Dupekill started out as a quick-and-dirty Python script to get rid of duplicate files in a directory of sounds that a friend and I had ripped from a video game. When we were writing it, I realized that I hadn't seen any apps out there that did what we were doing, so I asked him if I could take his code and improve upon it. He obliged, and over the winter of 2011 I turned the script into Dupekill.

It is now over 10 times faster than the first incarnation, can recurse into subdirectories, can be configured to ignore symlinks and shortcuts, and features a "dry run" to show the user which files would be deleted. I've used it on my own files and have tested it extensively. It does exactly what we set out to do, and I hope someone out there finds it useful.

2022-06-04 Update: There are improvements planned for future releases, including interactive choice per-file of which to keep, and options to choose for all conflicts, via command-line flags. No promises, but there are plans!

2022-06-04 UPDATE: Sporkblog is effectively dead. I would be interested in pursuing a more modern version of Sporkblog, cleaning up the core components. It can occupy the solution space between static site generators and Wordpress. Please contact me if you are interested in collaborating on this goal.

Project Page

Sporkblog started as my first foray into web development. I began work on it in 2008, and quickly learned that the trick to software development is building something in a way that allows you to understand it when you come back to it. Months after finishing Sporkblog's first version, I came back to it and discovered that I had failed. It was a mess, and I needed to clean it up.

I began Sporkblog's next iteration, and with it I held onto some principles that I believed were most important. I decided that the blog should:

• Be easy to navigate, without superfluous information;
• Have easy-to-read source, so hacking can be done somewhat easily;
• Have well-designed HTML so themes can be made with little effort;
• Allow visitors to comment without a distorted image CAPTCHA or registering an account

I also put Sporkblog under Git revision and started learning better project management habits.

In July 2012, Sporkblog's second version was released. It included all of the functionality I considered necessary in a blog, and good enough to run my personal website on. There are still some improvements left that I believe need to be made, but it's ready to be hacked on.

After a few months of working on and off on a blog source that follows my sensibilities, Sporkblog has reached its first release. It isn't a stable 1.0 yet, but it's good enough for me to start dogfooding it.

Sporkblog is a very simplistic and intuitive blog source that allows a blog to turn into a more traditional style website, with the added flexibility and power of the weblog publishing methodology. The navigation of Sporkblog is easily manipulated; you create tags as you create content. From there, you can assign certain tags to be displayed in the navigation, and any posts under the "Navpage" tag will automatically be displayed in the navigation under "Pages".

This allows your typical Contact, About, and other similar pages to be displayed in a page all to themselves while maintaining the section-based content heirarchy. Couple it with the power of tags and you have a website whose structure can fit anyone's needs.

In time, I hope to better develop Sporkblog and provide another alternative for blogging and website publishing.

2022-06-10 Update: This is the oldest post on the blog. I've kept it to remind me of where the site's purpose came from, and to appreciate how far it's come since then. Looking over these old posts has given me a fresher perspective on my own body of work.