Recently in Development Category
Between last night and tonight I have worked through rewriting my blog's templates using more MT4 friendly methods. What does this mean to you? Very little. Commenting will be easier, so if you've ever had something to say to me now is the time. A tag cloud will appear on the right side. That'll be more interesting as I use tags more. I cleaned up my blogroll a bit and put it into one single links section. If you want to be in there, give a shout. Oh yeah, and searching should work better, too.
Overall not a whole lot changes here. I will start deploying the new stuff in a few minutes. I will post again when deployment is complete.
A couple of months ago I started to talk about requiring people to sign in to comment on my blog. I'm not about to require you to register on my site, but there is typekey. The ability to log into typekey is a common feature among blogs, so it's not a huge stretch to require it and it will hopefully put either slow down or stop the comment spam I've been getting. Maintaining the spam lookups list is just too time consuming for me. As I mentioned, I may set up open id logins so livejournal and open id users can comment as well.
A nice side effect is that permalinks are loading a little faster now. Handy.
Unless you're reading this entry through an aggregator, you've undoubtedly noticed the new look to this site. In fact, if I've done a really good job, you've done a double take and wondered if you're in the right place.
You are.
The old look and feel was a lot of fun to put together and use, but the truth is it was just plain unclean. I felt colors were a little gaudy, and everything was just overall dark. The worst part was that everything felt totally crowded.
When I set to work on this new look I intended to put everything in the same boxes the entries are in, but a wise friend suggested that I don't. He was right. I like it much better this way.
Anyhow, I'm pretty excited about the new look, and that's why I published the change before everything was as perfect as I feel like making it. Below is my to-do list to finish up.
- Fix blogroll
- Remove version from 'Powered By' section
- Recode the 'About' section
- Recode the 'Contact' section
- Fix a link color in the comments section
- Tweak widths of div tags in entry headings so all categories fit
- Upgrade MT
- Recode the search result page
Today is my blog's first month anniversary. Isn't that convenient, how I started on the first of a month? Now I just have to remember what month! Anyway, I doubt I'll be doing anything like this again until a year, maybe only six months.
I never knew I had so much to talk about, but I've found something almost every day. In fact, every day except those that I was not in town. I'm pretty proud of that. Proud of that and all the stuff I've managed to write. I'm not much of a writer, but I think I've done well here.
On March 12 I started running a hit counter. At the moment, just before publishing this entry, there are 685 hits. From here on out, I will not be talking about the date. But I feel like that's pretty good for one man's site about nothing linked to by only one person. Maybe some day I'll make that number visible, but mostly I just enjoy looking at it. It's at the top of the source code for the main page.
Every month my right column will get longer. I'm looking forward to seeing that. I feel like the site will look better when the side columns are long enough to match the middle column better. Maybe I should be writing these entries as extended entries, but why make you load another page? It's not like I write novels, and since I don't use any graphics I don't see a speed issue.
Any how, the left column is harder to grow. I won't link to sites I don't regularly visit, and some of the sites I regularly visit just don't fit with the theme of this blog. If this blog even has a theme. But the point is that I want more sites to visit and more links on this blog, so leave me a comment and I'll read your site. And I'll probably like it, because anyone who managed to find me probably did so through a mutual friend. And then I'll link to it and read it regularly. Nice how that works!
Well, my friends, I have done some more work on the site. I finally added the about page, so you can all read about me. I also added the contact page, so you can send private messages to me now. I still have to pretty up the contact form a little bit, but you get the idea.
Tonight I put it on record that I have added a hit counter to this site. I wrote it myself using PHP. It is currently invisible, and only triggered by the front page of the site. You can see the status of the hit counter at the very top of the source code. Mainly I'm saying this because when the number gets a little larger I'm going to make it visible, and when that happens I'll probably say that I started counting today. So on record I go!
Also, very much thanks to my good friend, skadz, I have fixed my RSS 1.0 and 2.0 feeds, updated my pings, and installed MT-Blacklist.
So this site has finally hit a state where I can officially say it's released and not feel like a jerk because some of the content I link to is broken. It all works now. And that makes me feel good.
Ah, development. How I love it. Or hate it, really depending on what I'm doing and when I'm doing it. PHP has a tendency to be very frustrating when the coder isn't used to working in it constantly. Still, I rewrote a couple of "hacks" today that I had written for Blog for America. Of course, at some point early on the decision was made to cut out PHP support for the server and these hacks were removed, their code lost.
The first of these hacks is all about authors. Its a silly thing for me to spend my time on, really, since I'll almost certainly be the only author, but I did it. Basically this hack displays an entry author's nickname if it exists and their username if not. This means some degree of obfuscation if desired, but doesn't require it.
The second of the hacks is all about my blog roll. I created a second blog and set up three categories -- Bloggers I Know, Bloggers I Don't Know, and External Links. Look familiar? They're the same as the categories on the left hand side of this site. I use MovableType's bookmarklet to post interesting sites to this blog. I archive it by category.
I use a PHP include to include the flat file of the category archives for this blog. The template for those category archives is special. With PHP, I created a keyed array of all the posts using the entry title as the key and entry body as the value. Next I sorted the array by key. Finally, I loop through the array and output everything, with a slight indent, as I prefer indentation, and unset the variable. The last step is crucial, lest you just continue adding to the same array each time you include that PHP code.
Of course I'm also tweaking little stuff here and there. Since I haven't built the contact section of the site yet, feel free to drop a comment if you're interested in getting a copy of the code. I'm happy to share.
Now that I have hit the first, in my opinion major, milestone in the development of this site, I am going to pause and write the first real entry. Because I am now writing real entries, there will no longer be a need for test entries, so that category will go dead. Not wanting this blog to appear sparse, even when it is just beginning, I'm going to wait until I have a few real entries before I do away with the test entries.
This morning I report on the state of the blog, as it is now. I started development last night and worked on and off for a few hours. Most of what I've got at this point was done then. This morning a final touch was put on to deem the main index to be usable.
Last night was a battle. I learned a bit about how MovableType's modules work, as I created this site in a very modular way. Indeed, I may even break it down further as I plan on using the same code in several places.
The calendar was an interesting thing. I retooled the majority of it, and it's a little mashed together, but I think it's still legible. Since people can still read it, it stays.
The entries themselves were fun to write. They were the first piece to require a little PHP hacking. If you're interested in seeing how I convinced MovableType to place all entries from the same day into one table, feel free to get in touch with me when I eventually get my contact page up.
In other news, I plan on leaving the state for the evening and returning tomorrow. With that and other work, I'm not sure how much more work on this will get done today. But I do plan to try to get some done.