gpnl redesign, part two

Work on the revised GPNL is coming along quite nicely. One thing I am particularly proud about this round of revisions is that I’m finally removing support for all third party tools completely. Hallelujah. This was always a major crutch, and one that kept me from working on it a lot of the time. There was so much I’d like to do, but directly. Now, though, through a combination of cutting down on wanted features, dropping metadata and writing better code, the whole thing has been simplified and everything is going much smoother.

I’ve been busy working on other stuff as well, so I’m not completely done, but I’m pretty sure most of the features are already all in place. What’s surprising is how short a time it has taken — maybe ten hours or so max. The same thing happened when I rewrote bend (my DVD ripper shell script for TV shows). The first one took forever to spec out and layout the framework and design, but the second one just falls right into place quite quickly. It’s a good way to get momentum for a project moving. Of course, a lot of my projects are usually a proof-of-concept the first time around, and the second one is the actual product I had envisioned in the first place. Funny how that seems to work out that way. And I just realized that my stats project, first round, was also a proof-of-concept. Second round is equally going to be much nicer.

Anyway, there’s not much left. I need to import some package metadata, and then it’s on to rebuilding frontends (gpnl, packages). Whee! 🙂

Oh, on another note, I’ve started creating some Atom feeds for the packages website.  I could use some ideas of what to put out, if anyone has any ideas.  Or, if someone wants to do me a really big favor and make an XSLT stylesheet for the feeds, I’d be very grateful.

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