Re: [emacs-wiki-discuss] remember-blosxom for slugs who don't care about story names

[Gary V. Vaughan]

Hi TC!

TC wrote:
> One of the things I like about "remember" is that, as the lisp
> commentary says, it's intention is that:
> 
>   'the initial "just remember this" impulse should be as close 
>    to simply throwing the data at Emacs as possible.'
> 
> So when it comes to remember-blosxom, although it gives lots of
> functionality in displaying that "simply thrown" data, it demands of me
> that I provide a "Blosxom Category", and that seems to break the
> fundamental idea of throw and move on. It's particularly cumbersome (OK,
> I over-state the case, but I am a slug after all) given that the
> category must be unique.  So, every time I throw data, I effectively
> also have to *think* in order to generate a title. In using
> remember-blosxom so far, I often find myself thinking "whatever!" in
> response to the "Blosxom Category" question.
>
> Is there any way to pander to my laziness ('cos I don't think I'm
> unique)?

Well, history is enabled for the prompts, so maybe you could up-arrow
and add a couple of characters for uniqueness?

There are a couple of problems remember-blosxom is trying to solve:

  (i)   blosxom uses the first line of a story as its title, but
        emacs-wiki-blosxom uses the file name (or #title anchor)
  (ii)  the published stories want to be categorised

I thought about these a lot when I wrote remember-blosxom, and my
solutions were:

  (i)   use the file name as the title but let the user override
        with #title, and generate that for the user on publication
  (ii)  prompt for a category intelligently with completion, history
        and some know-how about what is valid

I wasn't really thinking inside remember's point of view, but rather
taking the path of least resistance to let me publish my blosxom
journal in emacs-wiki markup...

> What about this:
> 
> a. A timestamp is used to create a unique filename which is offered to
> the user as a default reply to the "Blosxom Category" request.
> b. If the user gives a null response, it is treated as acceptance of the
> default and the blosxom story is created with that filename and title,
> and in the top level blosxom directory
> b. If the user gives a response that is simply the name of an existing
> directory (without any filename appended), then default filename is
> used, but the story is created in that blosxom directory

Sounds good so far...

> c. If the user gives a response that is not the name of an existing
> directory or file, that entire response is used as the filename,
> including any path to subdirectories

That should work already! (maybe I patched my emacs-wiki.el to make it
happen though)

> d. If the response is the name of an existing file, the response is
> rejected

Or a sequence number could be tacked on for emacs-wiki, but the same
title used in both published blosxom stories?

> That way, the lazy slugs can simply "remember", type in their stuff, hit
> C-c C-c, and then go back to sleep; the moderately keen can rely on the
> prompts for the filename, while choosing a directory (a.k.a. category),
> and the downright energetic can specify the full story name, including
> directory.

Excellent ideas :-)  If you get bored of waiting for me to find time to
implement them, poke me with a big patch :-D

Cheers,
        Gary.
-- 
Gary V. Vaughan      ())_.  address@hidden,gnu.org}
Research Scientist   ( '/   http://tkd.kicks-ass.net
GNU Hacker           / )=   http://www.gnu.org/software/libtool
Technical Author   `(_~)_   http://sources.redhat.com/autobook

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