The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Friday, February 11, 2000

It's not exactly a protocol …

LiveJournal.com is a free service here on the Internet that allows you to create and customize your very own “live journal” … an up-to-the-minute log of whatever you're doing, when you're doing it. It's free, it's fun, it's easy to use!

LiveJournal.com, via Flutterby

The actual link from Flutterby was to the LiveJournal protocol. The protocol itself it nothing more than a documentation of their CGI interface. It's documented with the intention of other people writing software to interface to the CGI, but a webform would work just as well (or at least support the HTTP POST method).

For the individual journals, you can only see an overview of the last X number of entries, in reverse order of course (newest to oldest, and even the entires made within a single day are newest to oldest).

The archive section lists each month, with a link per day (the text of the link is the number of individual entries that day). The day is then presented in chronological order. But, you can't request all the entries for a month. For instance: Bethany's LiveJournal Calendar. Select a day, say today.

Now, take a look at the URL:

http://www.livejournal.com/users/bethany/day?year=2000&month=2&day=11

Munging it up, I left off the day portion and got:

Errors occurred processing this page:

(nevermind that is the full text of what I got back—completely non-standard HTML). Okay, what if I change the URL to read:

http://www.livejournal.com/users/bethany/month?year=2000&month=11

Would I then get all of February's entries? Nope. Just a 404 error (and an error page that again, isn't HTML compliant). Then again, I don't think anyone is really working on the stuff I'm working on, but when I get this out there, that should raise the bar a bit (hope hope).

LiveJournal isn't a bad service but there doesn't seem to be many journals there I find worth reading (with most entries being a line or two at best).

BML … because it's better

Came across BML, a Better Markup Language. Seems promising actually. And LiveJournal uses it. I'm looking into it—it has some interesting ideas.

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The dates are the permanent links to that day's entries (or entry, if there is only one entry). The titles are the permanent links to that entry only. The format for the links are simple: Start with the base link for this site: https://boston.conman.org/, then add the date you are interested in, say 2000/08/01, so that would make the final URL:

https://boston.conman.org/2000/08/01

You can also specify the entire month by leaving off the day portion. You can even select an arbitrary portion of time.

You may also note subtle shading of the links and that's intentional: the “closer” the link is (relative to the page) the “brighter” it appears. It's an experiment in using color shading to denote the distance a link is from here. If you don't notice it, don't worry; it's not all that important.

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