You may have noticed no new blog entries for the last few months. Simple reason. I’ve been working on Grotblog, and finally finished it, as you can see (this blog now runs on it).

My original intent was to detail each step in blog entries as I went along. But as I began to build it, I realized there were too many changes happening at once, and I’d be correcting old blog entries all the time with updated specs.

On top of that, writing about what you’re coding as you’re coding just slows down your progress.

One other problem: My intent was to grab all the blog entries I’d already done off Wordpress, and replicate them in Grotblog. The problem is that it’s devlishly hard to get backups out of Wordpress in any format that’s useful. There is an add-on which will email backups to you, but they’re in the form of table dumps from the database– less than useful, to say the least.

I hacked their add-on backup module to email me something more acceptable, but it was still a chore to get them in a form which would be useful for uploading in Grotblog. So the more blog entries I did in Wordpress, the more hassle I would have had in exporting them and then importing them into Grotblog.

So I just decided to skip it. Rather than make blog entries, I would code instead. The final result, the 1.0 version is here and on SourceForge.

Now that that’s done, I will go back from time to time and blog about the design issues and elements of Grotblog.

Enjoy!