Kevin's Weblog

Lots of people have said it, I’ll say it too. Writing the first line of code is the hardest, and you need to just stop thinking and do it.

It’s been clear to me for a while that blosxom needs a test suite. It’s also been clear that this is a more complicated business than the usual unit tests I’ve written for tons of modules. So, I’ve spent way too much time mulling over what the ideal design for such a thing would be. Finally, today I decided that I need to just start writing something. I can start with simple smoketests that don’t need all the fancy bells-and-whistles that have been cluttering my brain. So, I did it. I spent 10 minutes, wrote 30 lines of code, and I now have a smoketest of a bone-stock blosxom installation with one entry, comparing the output to a reference file. It’s a total hack at the moment, and it won’t scale at all to a second test, but I’ll worry about that tomorrow.

Blosxom 2.0.2 went up on Sourceforge a couple days ago. It’s got a couple bug fixes for static mode and more esoteric setups, like running blosxom as an SSI, and some aesthetic improvements. There seems to be some renewed momentum on the developer list, so hopefully we’ll see some more regular updates in the future.