[emacs-wiki-discuss] Proposed changes in emacs-wiki-journal

[Michael Olson]

I am trying to get emacs-wiki-journal to the point where I can feel
comfortable using it again.  Right now I am just pasting journal
entries to the right pages by hand, but this is starting to get a bit
old :^) .

** Immediate Changes

One of the changes that will show itself in this next release (2.64)
is in how the journal entries look when newly-added.  Previously,
there was a lot of (IMHO) unnecessary whitespace in the entry.  An
example of the new default kind of entry is included between the
triple curly braces.

{{{
#category<name_of_category>nn
* Timestamp
** Title goes here
<optional_category_icon_goes_here>
*** <name_of_category>

<point_is_here>
}}}

Please let me know before Wednesday if you absolutely can't stand this
new look and prefer the old one, and I'll make it configurable.
Suggestions are welcome, even after Wednesday (when I anticipate
making the release).

Another change you might note is the way that lists are represented.
I am inserting a space before the dash whenever a new entry is
recorded in a Category page.  There are several good reasons for this.

 - It allows you to use M-q on paragraphs and not have to worry about
   whether any of your dashed words will be interpreted as lists.  If
   you have a sentence with a dashed-term-like-this, it could be split
   on a dash, which would render something incorrectly as a list.

 - Muse requires that a space come before a dash at the beginning of a
   list.

I will send out a separate message about this feature change since it
will eventually affect emacs-wiki in general.  A transition function
will be provided at release time that reformats lists to match the new
format.

** Future changes

I would like to have things set up so that when you make a new entry,
the new entry is placed in a file called
Category<my_category>.yyyy.mm, where "<my_category>" is the name of
the category you choose, "yyyy" is the year, and "mm" is the month.

This serves the purpose of keeping your journal page from getting too
clogged with entries, without having to rely on the <default_page>.nn
syntax.  Those who browse your website can click on a particular
category that they are interested in, and they can see all the entries
for a given month.

Before control is given back to the user,
`emacs-wiki-journal-add-entry' will also add a line to
Category<my_category>, just as it did before.  I think what I would
like to do is introduce a "<journal-entries>" tag that would allow you
to have a certain number of the latest entries inserted at that point
during publish time.

For example, I could put the following in my MyJournal file.

<journal-entries num="4" from="all">

This would insert the latest 4 entries from throughout my Categories
(not 4 from each category).  Another use that I can think of: If I
have a journal file called CategoryWebpage that is devoted to news
about the changes I make to my website, I could simply put the
following code on the News section of my WelcomePage.

<journal-entries num="4" from="CategoryWebpage">

I would love to hear your thoughts on this.

-- 
Michael Olson -- FSF Associate Member #652 -- Web: http://www.mwolson.org/
Jabber: mwolson_at_hcoop.net -- IRC: mwolson on freenode.net: #muse, #pulug
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