New Feature — Introducing the catalog

One of the problems I've encountered so far is that I had to update a handful of Story List blocks for every new item. At least two for the section, and one or two for the home page itself. I have mentioned I wanted to do some sort of central catalog mechanism. Well, I went ahead and implemented that.

Each category has a separate listing, and then each year has a separate listing. To make use of those, I created a handful of Perl blocks that allow me to process those files in pre-determined ways. Of particular note, the yearly files are brought together to generate the most recent articles list as it's entirely possible I will not have enough articles to fill out the list on January 1st each year. In fact, it's entirely possible I will not even have enough to fill out the list over several years, so I go back at least three. If I were smart, I would keep going back in time until I hit some pre-determined limit. No matter, it's good enough for now, so that's that.

In the future, I may consolidate the section-specific files into the yearly file, adding a few more fields along the way, like section and a date. This would definitely come in handy for generating an RSS feed.