Emacs clinic at the Linux Caffe

| emacs

Quinn Fung needed some help with Muse and RDF so that she could easily generate RSS feeds from Emacs, so we declared today to be Emacs Clinic day at the Linux Caffe.

We started by getting publishing to work. We then figured out how to get RDF to publish, and that was pretty okay too.

Quinn needed multiple authors, and muse-journal didn't support it yet,
so we hacked it in. I told her to pick a syntax, and I added code to
make it happen. It took us a while to track things down, but it turned
out to be a reasonably easy addition. (I need to refactor that code
sometime… that's a really long function!)

Along the way, we found a bug in muse-journal. Muse-journal summarizes entries by taking the first two sentences, but dies when the post doesn't contain at least two periods. I spent a fair bit of time tracing through the different changes we made before realizing that it wasn't my bug. I probably would've found it earlier, but debug-on-error wasn't getting honored. Odd. Anyway, here's the patch, which I'll submit to GNA when I get back into the swing of things:

--- orig/lisp/muse-journal.el
+++ mod/lisp/muse-journal.el
@@ -570,7 +570,9 @@
           (let ((beg (point)))
             (if (muse-style-element :summarize)
                 (progn
-                  (forward-sentence 2)
+                  (condition-case err
+                      (forward-sentence 2)
+                    (error (goto-char (point-min))))
                   (setq desc (concat (buffer-substring beg (point)) "...")))
               (save-restriction
                 (muse-publish-markup-buffer "rss-entry" "html")

Now Quinn's jumping feet-first into Lisp development by doing the Atom
implementation. muse-atom does single-entry Atom files, but she can
model it on muse-journal's RSS implementation.

I also helped Ian set up a very very basic Planner. It reminded me
that I *really* need to package planner-bundle again, and either
retire or update plannerlove. In fact, I need to set up scripts so
that it's ridiculously easy to keep up to date…

I miss hacking on Emacs! This is fun. I'll reconfigure my kernel and
get VPN working. Then I'll set up my Emacs development environment
again…

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