The latest version of Gitblog got a new posts manager, which has been inspired by the inbox of Google Mail.

As a post can be in several states (and versions) at the same time, I had to use multiple dimensions of visual cues — row colors, labels (”Draft”, the “scheduled” clock) and hierarchical rows in the case when there is a work version alongside a cached version.

• Yellow marks a modified, uncommitted (but tracked) working copy with an older cached version live.
• Green marks a scheduled, tracked post (which will appear live once it’s future publish date is reached).
• Red marks a post which has been removed in the working stage, but is still tracked (previous version is still live).
• Grey marks a uncommitted (untracked) post, a post which does not have a record in the repository.

To get this feature, simply perform a git pull in your gitblog directory:

cd path/to/my/blog/gitblog
git pull

Yesterday Markdown support was introduced in a new version of Gitblog. Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format.

Simply give your post a file extension of .md, .mdown or .markdown and you’re done.

For example, have a look at this post from yesterday and compare it to it’s Markdown source: content/posts/2009/10-10k-comet-connections.md.

The Mardown Extra flavour is used, adding structures like tables and header id tags. There are also a few Gitblog specific things, most notably the support for code-blocks (syntax highlight). Language can be explicitly specified using a shebang:

#!language
actual code...

To get this feature, simply perform a git pull in your gitblog directory:

cd path/to/my/blog/gitblog
git pull

I’ve laid the groundwork for the upcoming Gitblog user interface.

So, my blog is back up again after a month downtime. We tried to upgrade Wordpress on our server and when pressing the upgrade button, Wordpress deleted every file on our server (writable by the web server user). So, all 30+ web sites hosted, all Hunch Stuff from 2003 to 2009 and our Subversion repository is gone forever. Nope, we’re stupid and did not have a backup.

I set out to write a better blog tool than Wordpress and here it is — behold the mighty Gitblog.

More info to come.