first of all, sorry for not posting for so long. stressy times and a lot of other jobs ... regarding the direction antville: i see antville basically as a framework (or, in german words, as a "lego-baukasten") for (weblog-)publishing. there is one basic principle that anville has to follow: "ease of use". because i see antville as a framework, i don't think it makes any sense to decide now if antville is going to be a system for personal weblogs or for project weblogs or whatever (i'm just hoping that people will start to play with it and "abuse" it until it fits to their needs). i don't see antville replacing the helma.org-application (at least in its first version(s)), the approach of both is much too different.

antville is a bucket of content: text, images, sounds (or other binaries). so the first step of antville has to provide an EASY WAY to create those contents, to manage and structure them and to display them according to your imagination (either dynamically or as static html-pages ftp'd to another server). on the other hand, it's critical that visitors get a good overview what changed where, what changed somewhere since their last visit, commenting is easy (and not that confusing like it is now) ...

since antville has to be more than a host-system for a bunch of isolated "content-ghettos", it really has to have some intelligent ways of linking those logs together (by exchanging headlines or whole stories, designs (including images and stuff) ...). and since nothing keeps you away from downloading helma yourself, installing antville and starting to play with it, these features must work also between antville-installations on other machines.

i strongly believe that there are ways to implement functionalities needed for a real projectlog-system into antville, but i think antville needs a flexible structure (including database, prototypes and code) first. and since antville itsself needs a project weblog, i'd say this could be version 2.

well, i am only looking for an easy to use weblog, sin frustration of publishing, sin problems of connectivity and with the possibility to work with a little bit more than plain text. and i still think, there is a need for that out there. well, claro, i am no developer, solamente usuaria. from this point of view i am completely ignorant about finding the new nutshell at the first place, but i am interested in discussing usability and how a language, that is easy to use for developer, can be translated for endusers

i'll update the db (just to set modifytime = createtime where modifytime is null)

this "recently updated" thing rocks. - although i was (silently) in favour of the highlighting option.

• I think the name of the author should not be a link in the recently modified list, it adds clutter/visual noise. I would prefer every link in this list to be a link to a story/comment
• Displaying the first 20 characters of the text and then just cutting is a bit ... rude. I'd prefer to cut whole words only, and then add "..." (I have the code for both on henso.com). Actually, I'm not extremely convinced about this it its current form: I think you'd have to take more text (like 100 characters) for it to be recognizable as story text and distinguishable from the other stuff in the list.
• Stories or comments with no title generate an entry without link. What should we do in this case? Display a placeholder title like "[No title]" or "Comment by xxx", or use the first few words of the text as link instead?