Hello Whatever I Will Call It

Whilst in and about blosxom plugins, I wrote one from scratch. Back with BlogMax, every day’s entry had a title and when you compiled the data files into the blog files, it would put the daily title into the title tag of the HTML header section. I always liked this. There is a blosxom plugin that will put the entry title (they all have one) into the header if you are going directly to a single entry. That’s not what I’m after, though. I want the most recent entry’s title in the page’s title. I wrote a plugin that does that, which I am tentatively calling “titler” until something better comes along.

It’s not completely optimal yet, but it is running on this blog right now. It works by caching the story title of the first one when looking only at the unqualified page. If you are requesting a specific date or a specific category or a specific file, it does nothing. Otherwise, it inserts the cached title into a variable at head() time. In the story() function, if it is the first story seen and if the current title differs from the cached title, it rewrites the cache to the new title. This means that the first page view after a new entry will be showing the second to last title. I don’t really want to have to duplicate the whole “what is the first entry” logic, which all happens later anyway when the stories are assembled. The cost of that is one suboptimal page server per entry change. I can live with that. It remains to be seen if anyone else cares, will use this, and/or finds themselves bothered by that. After I’ve tested it a little, I’ll put it up and register it on the blosxom plugin site. Name suggestions are gratefully accepted until then.

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dave

Dave Slusher is a blogger, podcaster, computer programmer, author, science fiction fan and father. Member of the Podcast Hall of Fame class of 2022.

2 thoughts on “Hello Whatever I Will Call It”

  1. Assclown, you are hooked up. It is running on your site. I put the plugin in, and added to your html.head (only that flavour, so do others if you want this there) the piece

    That will be empty if there is nothing to add, or it will be ” –

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