I've been having trouble with my Ode Counter add-in.

I have been using File::Find to gather filesystem information and make it available to Ode, and I learned two things.

1) The Ode add-in framework allows the passing of scalar variable data from add-in to non-post areas of the site, but it doesn't allow passing of arrays. This is easy enough to work around. You just convert the array to a scalar. There is more than one way to do this, but I chose this one:

$directory_list = join('', @directory_list_array);

2) Producing acceptable HTML out of the add-in is one thing, but for it to transfer properly to the Ode site, all the usual characters must be "escaped" on the server side:

Instead of:

<li><a href="/blog/programming/perl/">Programming > Perl</a></li>

It must be:

<li><a href=\"\/blog\/programming\/perl\/\">Programming > Perl<\/a><\/li>

Once I fix my regex, I'll be in business.

I've been working on and off on the next version of the Counter addin for Ode sites.

The last update added counts of photos in the blog's filesystem to the original counts of entries with breakouts for traditional blog entries and social updates (basically counting everything in the whole documents directory and the updates directory, then using a little math.

I used the File::Find CPAN module as the backbone of the addin.

The next thing I wanted to do, also using File::Find, was to crawl the blog's filesystem and generate a categories list that can be displayed on the site.

So I've been playing with File::Find, Perl regular expressions and arrays.

I am able to generate an array made up of every directory that contains Ode posts, and I'm working on the regex to make the HTML and display text look exactly the way I want.

At this point I have a pretty good looking array, and I'm ready to move the Categories code (which I'm developing in a local directory with a "dummy" filesystem) into the main Counter addin code.

There are still some issues to work out, but as soon as I get the next version of the Counter addin ready, I will make it available for download and also hopefully have it on Github.

From the Ode forum:

How to do a slide presentation with Ode

Get the Presentation theme here.