Fundamental things in blog land. People, posts (comments are posts),...

The headspace handles people well, I think. Not that there arent things to be done here. It would be nice to know at any given time if you were logged in, for instance. The registration process and login pages, etc. could all use some cleanup.

The headspace doesn't, however, associate people with posts very well.

Posts are a real mess at present. They contain a real mixed bag of things: html, encoded data structures, etc.

Homogenize posts.

It is probably easier to extend posts via adding database columns than encoding datastructures. The latter is possibly more flexible but is otherwise a huge pain in the ass. To make the former work I MUST encapsulate my database calls. Currently database calls are slathered all over the place.

Posts have content and meta-data. Meta-data is stuff like author, synopsis, etc.

Templating has worked out well for me. It would be nice to formalize the template language and write a slightly more robust processor. It would also be nice to store the templates in the database. This may require more thinking, though. While templating has worked I find it aesthetically troubling.

On storing html: I don't think there is any way around this without dumbing things down so much I wouldn't be able to stand it, except, perhaps, for using xml... and that seems like 6 of one...

More on posts:

I am tempted to think of posts like this: a post consists of two parts, as mentioned above: content and meta-data. This would equate to two database fields. Content would be whatever... this necessitates content-type meta-data. Meta-data would be plain text: name:value\ . This keeps the database simple and the meta-data human-readable and extensible. The required meta-data fields would be content-type and class. content-type describes the content, obviously... class would describe how the meta-data was to be used.

Of course doing things that way contradicts my comments about not encoding data structures above.

I can definitely feel myself over-generalizing here (overhyphenating, as well.)

Spell-checking would be handy :P