The Eighty-Twenty Solution

I was a little burned out on my pet project after a furious spurt of activity to complete my presentation for DALUG. It turns out that was sort of fortuitous; there's been a new draft of the Atom API and one thing I was stressing over was introspection. Overall, I like the <link> tag approach better, both as the author of the weblog engine and the client posting apparatus. Now that I have some practical experience with it, I agree with Dare, the big win is not in syndication, where IMO, Atom won't be worthwhile until it has a way to support WFW style comments, but in the server API. My approach with this project has been that Atom is the core format for everything, and I transform into whatever other formats I want. That's worked fine so far. I went and joined Atom-Syntax last night because a few implementation questions have been cropping up, and as I caught up on the recent archives, I think I see what prompted Sam's post. I agree most of all with the first point on his list, though Joe has most of what I've needed to know. Certainly, there's been enough to keep me moving forward. Whatever happens, I intend to keep moving forward with my project, for the learning experience if nothing else. Here's a specific list of what I need to do:

• Clean up my CSS and my HTML generation; specifically, I want to clean up the date display and just generally get consistent styles. Ideally, all this will validate as well.
• Fix the double escaping problem with &apos;
• I have a quick & dirty posting mechanism, but I'd like something better; I'm currently working on an Atom API plugin for NewsGator and possibly MzScheme. One outstanding issue is that I need some sort of security before I make this my main weblog. I don't see any particular problem with implementing WSSE security, except that I can't find a SHA (or MD5, for that matter) implementation for Scheme, and I expect that implementing it would be more work than I'm inclined to do. I'm considering using SWIG to generate a wrapper around another implementation, if anyone knows of an easier solution, I'm all ears.
• I need a conversion routine from Blosxom posts to Atom. I don't think that will be difficult to write, I may take the time to do it this afternoon.

Finally, I've been thinking about setting up a SourceForge project for this, in case anyone's interested (and because using FTP to my site falls pretty far short of what CVS would provide). Right now, I'm being held back by 2 issues: the source is PLT Scheme-specific, and I don't have a name (another reason I didn't pursue a career in music, I can't name things). I'm not going for plays on Lisp or Scheme; I've been entertaining plays on Atom like "Neutrino" or "Molecule". The latter name makes more sense, but is goofy, IMO.