• Creating a Blog I'll Actually Use

    02-24-2010 4:41 AM

    I have 3 blogs including this one.  And they're all being neglected.  The last post on any of them was 5 months ago.  There are lots of reasons why I don't write more.  Busy at work, social life, good old-fashioned laziness.  But there's only one that activates my programmer's itch.  My blog interface is just not user-friendly enough.

    When I do get the urge to write, nothing derails it faster than getting irritated with the actual writing process.  Getting your thoughts onto paper should be the easy part.  The hard part is ensuring that those thoughts don't make you look like and idiot.

    So this blog post serves 2 purposes.

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  • Generating Abstract Text from HTML content

    01-17-2009 2:11 AM

    In the world of online content management, we often want to introduce an article with a summary or abstract. The best example of this is the front page of a blog. You are presented with a list of the most recent articles with just a few paragraphs from each to get your interest. If want to continue you can click through and get the full text. Until recently, this blog didn't do that. It's a pretty important addition for me because my posts tend to run long, and my Home Page was getting pretty lengthy from just 3 posts. Here's the rundown on adding this feature.

    A Few Requirements

    First a little setup. Ideally this summary would be written specifically for the article and formatting nicely for it's space in the page. But since we live in the real world, we are generally given a few requirements for our system to make this easier. These are the general guidelines I used:

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