Events

2008-07-08 11:49:48 by mcfarland in , (34 comments) permalink

Post #404! Something appropriate about that.

Michael Fogus, d.b.a. Minotaur Computing has generously volunteered to take over the development and maintenance of the CLI project. I’ll still be following it, and contribute to it, but basically the theme has become a bit of a drag on me and it will be good for new (and more accomplished) leadership to take it to the next level. He has already set up a new repository on github. With new blood comes new directions: already there is talk to expand CLI beyond WordPress, so that it will become more of an alternative, pluggable interface to Web services that supply public APIs. This means you could potentially make a site that allows mixing and mashing information from e.g. Facebook, MySpace, Google, Yahoo, last.fm, Twitter, or anything else that anyone wants to write a plugin for, all through the command line. WordPress support might not happen via the theme engine, but rather through its XML-RPC interface. It will need all kinds of exciting new development: off the top of my head, some sort of writable “filesystem”, a module system better than the current “/usr/bin” setup, a standalone configuration system (i.e. not an extension to the WordPress “presentation” menu), an umbrella scheme for storing disparate information so that interoperation can take place… Here’s some things I’m fantasizing about:

• typing twitter.login thrind && twitter.subscribedFeeds | googleMaps.locate at the prompt to get a map of where all of my tweet-friends are located
• with wordpress; latest|email joeblow@foo.bar subject="My latest post" to set wordpress as the current application, then get the latest post and email it to a friend
• rss --source "http://feeds.boingboing.net/boingboing/iBag" --titleonly| grep -vi steampunk to display the Boing Boing feed with titles only and with any steampunk references removed
• wget http://wherever.com/something-neat.html; googleTranslate --source=it --to=en something-neat.html | wordpress.post --title="Look what I found (translated from Italian)" --category="Fun Stuff"; rm something-neat.html

Of course, things might not end up exactly like these examples, but it sure is fun to think of the possibilities. I’d like to hear new ideas — share them at the Google group.