Blog Tracker

Explanation

This is a BLT client. BLT stands for 'blog tracker' (originally for 'bloglet tracker'). It keeps track of new entries and comments in the so-called St. John's College Blogmass, a loosely connected group of blogs by some people who were going to St. John's College at around the same time, and their friends, and friends of friends.

History

Kerne wrote the first BLT script on December 16th, 2001. When Kerne's version was brought down by problems on his server, I wrote a permatemporary replacement version on February 17th, 2002. Eventually, on April 10th, 2002, Kerne wrote a new version of his BLT script. It pulled all its data off of my BLT script, using a simple tab-separated-values format, and presented a nicer front-end to it than mine had. Later, Kerne wrote a new weblogging program for his site. In the course of this, we reorganized BLT such that Kerne's site generated a separate tab-separated data feed, and Kerne's BLT--now the only full BLT client--merged the two feeds before displaying them. We got this new configuration up and running around July 21st, 2002. The new way of structuring things--with the data reachable over the web in a machine-readable format--made it possible to have multiple BLT clients running off the same databases, so on February 17th, 2003, Martin wrote his own version. As time went on, he added a number of useful features to it that didn't exist in the others. Martin's project (known as BLTadv) had originally been done just for hack value, rather than because of an outside need for it, but when Kerne switched to Movable Type on May 4th 2003, BLTadv became the only BLT. This arrangement continued for some time. However, the data for BLT was still available in machine-readable format, so it continued to be theoretically possible to write other applications that used it. In early 2004, Kerne wrote a BLT client for his own private use, and around the same time I started playing with ideas for a new client that would better match my browsing habits by presenting the BLT data in a different way. I finally finished this version on April 12th, 2004.

Colophon

The Blog Tracker is written in Python, and runs under mod_python on Apache 2. It generates valid HTML and uses CSS for layout. It was written by Moss Collum over the course of two weekends of April, 2004.