It’s been an interesting few weeks. I've been wanting a method of updating my journal through a web interface for quite some time now. The existing method has required a manual update of four separate files for each entry posted, and all done through my good friends telnet and vi. So after getting a quick preview, I finally downloaded Greymatter, poked at it, and liked everything about it – except for the fact that I couldn’t change the date. Knowing (as many of you long-time readers also know) of my propensity for back-posting on a regular basis, I knew that this was going to be a fairly large stumbling block. It could handle everything else but that.

Hooray for the available hacks! I can now set the date (as long as I do it correctly as it’s being entered – it doesn’t like to play nice when I try to update it later). I reformatted my archives page but it’ll have to be manual for now, until I finish tweaking Greymatter enough to make it do what I want for that section of the journal too. But I figured I really shouldn’t idle too much longer, so the archives will have to stay as they are for now and I’ll work on them later. Ta da! New journaling script, with (mostly) the same old look. And the best part is that I can do this all online now – no more having to telnet into the hosting server and modify four files for each entry posted. Plus, since Richard very nicely gave me access to what he uses to do his journal (a php script based on a MySQL database), I now have an online place to store drafts and notes for future entries as well.

The new template has been applied to all entries for the month of March. The only difference anyone should notice is that there is no ‘Previous’ link for the March 1st entry – simply because Greymatter doesn’t recognize anything before then. I could probably go in and manually add the information, but that would be overwritten the minute I change anything about the template and rebuild. So – tough luck. Anyone getting that far will just have to figure it out on their own.