Another way of handling the site on iPhone is pretty much direct from Apple sample code. The blog webapp, based on my site’s Atom feed, is a more specialized presentation than the iPhone styles already in place on the blog.
I like the webapp’s clean styling — especially after a touch on Mobile Safari’s plus (+) button and a tap on “Add to Home Screen” results in the complete “webapp experience,” sans [visible] Safari — and I certainly like how quick it was to get a basic working model going very quickly. I’m not sure if even I follow this site closely enough to need an iPhone WebApp version, but it’s fun and slick, anyway. Without the webapp bonus, the html/javascript combo looks and works fine (not quite perfectly) on Android, too.
When you really don’t want any dirty old Perl on your file server, you go looking for a Markdown filter in plain C. If you find David Parsons’ Discount, your work porting to Plan 9 isn’t too tough at all.
If you spend a few hours stripping things out, destroying a C library, and otherwise excising a thousand lines of code before introducing the remainder to cb(1), you end up with a markdown(1) for Plan 9. It’s still POSIX-y and pcc(1)-built, but it includes Plan 9 man(1) pages, and generally works as described therein.
It’s available with a BSD-like license (and credit to D. Parsons) at either the Utopian.net Labs link above, or from Bell Labs’ “sources” at /n/sources/contrib/josh/markdown.
A native Plan 9 C transliteration is in progress, but will take me longer than the POSIX port. For now, the existing markdown has the advantage of building on just about any POSIX-like system I’ve tried, even Windows (mingw or interix).
I added a rough cut of some iPhone-specific CSS to the site this morning, and it seems appropriate to post notice of this fascinating new development from the device itself. If you’re browsing through on some kind of small screen, let me know how legible you find things.
Tweedle-dee Dum said to Tweedle-dee Dee
“Your presence is obnoxious to me.”
If you’re a user of both the Habari blogging software and one of the many Laconica-based microblogging services (identi.ca being the most popular), you might like the laconica plugin I checked in yesterday. It’s a mere modification of the existing Habari Twitter plugin, but works against any user-entered Laconica server. The plugin provides a simple mechanism for a theme to display notices (or “dents”) from a Laconica service, as well as optionally posting to the service the title of and a link to each of your new blog posts.
As the Laconica “native” API is currently only a set of proposals, the plugin uses the Twitter-compatible API through a version of the code from the Twitter plugin. Thus, Laconica support could have been implemented as a modification to the Twitter plugin. However, that would curse the Twitter plugin with configuration code it doesn’t need, and the amount of that un-shared code would grow as the native Laconica API is adopted. The laconica plugin could extend the Twitter class, but that would saddle the user with installing both plugins just to use one. Since the plugin should follow the Laconica API as it develops, and abandon the Twitter-compatibility code, a separate Laconica plugin seemed to make the most sense.
Thanks to AndyC for the basic idea and testing, and to the author(s) of the Twitter plugin who did the existing work. I did the typing.
Enjoy!
For Michael Harris (or michaeltwofish on irc), here’s Dash Fish, which sticks A. Bowman’s fish widget in the Habari dashboard. It’s positively as useless as can be.
The flash/script combo can act a bit funny when activating/deactivating the Fish module. If this happens, click your back button. Everything’s fine. To avoid it, activate and deactivate the whole plugin, instead of the module. Maybe this could be fixed, but it’s a toy.
That problem is fixed.
Enjoy!