kerbtier

i think about a new blog. a nontechnical trashblog or something. for the kerbtier blog i’m using wordpress and i’m quite happy with it. lots of useful plugins and quite stable. but the code is somewhat funny and it’s not so easy to adapt/extend it to ones needs. i often had to change code instead of reconfigure or add code and this makes it time consuming to keep it up to date.

i looked for another blog software and found zine. it’s quite similar to wordpress but written in python. i did a test installation and till now everything went perfect. i didn’t test it properly but only the fact that it’s written in python makes me belive in it much more than in wordpress.

i recently started to develop a little twitter client in XUL. i did a lot of web-development with lots of javascript and i thought that it would be fast and easy to develop a XUL application. now, after a few hours i must say that XUL is a great thing. the available widgets are quite complete, the xml to desribe an UI is properly designed and it’s easy to manipulate the whole thing with javascript. i didn’t have a look at the template stuff yet and i dont know how usable it is. i’m a bit sceptic…

but

a pain in the ass is that javascript frameworks like prototype are only working partially. to manipulate the DOM with the DOM-API you need lots of unelegant lines of code. this would not be a problem if someone wrote a little javascript library for easier DOM-manipulation. but i didn’t found anything. the most javascript libraries are quite browserspecific and are not properly usable by XUL. there is in general almost no community produced stuff like tutorials, examples, proper IDEs… it is a bit frustrating to have almost only the API-reference-like tutorial and the API-reference on the official XUL homepage. firefox and mozilla are such well known. why isn’t there a big XUL echo from the internet?