When I left New York for California a week ago I was emerging from one of the most productive development spurts I'd ever had. I didn't know it then but I was about to enter a slump. Since leaving and returning I haven't gotten very much work done at all. I've tried all kinds of tricks to get myself back in gear, but none have worked. 

Over the many years I've been a developer, I've hit these periods of stagnation many times. I don't usually write about them -- who wants to say "Geez I didn't get very much done in the last few days" or I'm spending most of my time sleeping or playing video games or eating sushi or hanging out with friends or even hanging out by myself. Or waiting in a line at the Apple Store. Or whatever. Mostly, whatever. 

The next thing on my development plate is very exciting stuff!  

I want to make it so that blog posts can disappear from the timeline, and become standalone articles. 

Every blogging system needs this feature, and most have it. (For example Posterous just added it, with some fanfare.) 

The challenge is to do it without giving up too many features (hopefully none) and minimum disruption to the framework. My plan is to simply have a boolean for each post that says whether or not it's in the timeline. If it isn't we just skip it when building whatever it is we're building. I hope to catch this by sub-classing a relatively low-level verb that traverses a calendar structure in reverse-chronologic order. Come to think of it, maybe I'll just make it a new optional parameter to that routine. Maybe that's a good place to start? 

So at some point you might see this post disappear from the flow on scripting.com. When you see that happen you'll know that at least my period of stagnation has temporarily abated, if not completely receded.  

Another thing I want to do is designate a post as being rendered as an RSS feed, in addition to being rendered as HTML and OPML (as they all are). Hey maybe I should by default make all posts be rendered as RSS feeds? That might be pretty cool. The idea is that the post could then act as input to the EBS of Twitterlike things. Each headline in an outline is an awful lot like a tweet, especially in a world with annotated tweets. If you read the OPML spec and think about outline-level attributes you'll see what I mean. I want to get away from the idea that every tweet is entered into a dialog box as a separate thing. I like thinking of them as a connected stream of consciousness. Also dammit, sometimes my paragraphs are more than 140 characters. But when they flow to Twitter they will get cut off at 140 minus the length of any link pointing at it. 

If this post were an RSS feed I'd link to Rex Hammock's post about how Twitter has become too big to fail. He's got a very good point. 

Another thing I have partially done that I need to finish is the right-click menu for the blog post editor. In addition to the usual outline-editing commands I need some that are specific to Scripting2.  

Now a prayer to the programming fertility gods. Please let Dave resume his fecundity. Or fecundness. Or whatever. Mostly, whatever. ">