Formatting == Fun
As you can see, I’ve finally gotten off my rear end and turned BTN into a semi-standard blog — three-column layout, all that. The only thing missing is a comment facility; I’d like to set that up sometime soon, but it’d require at least another weekend of PHP-monkeying, and significantly more code design work than this required.
For those who might be curious: I decided that I just didn’t want to deal with databases any more than actually necessary, and I really didn’t want to go with a canned solution like Blogger or LJ. So I came up with a fairly simple solution: the front page reads .htm from the thoughts/ directory and displays the contents in reverse order, giving full-text of the last two, a self-defined “leader” (usually the first paragraph or two) for the previous three, then just title/link for the rest.
Canned solutions would have been a lot easier, to be sure, but there were three problems with that. First, I have a (probably irrational) hatred for database systems, so I wanted to avoid MySQL if I could, and just stick to a filesystem-based design, since I’m doing this for (ahem) fun. I know I’ll have to do some MySQLing when I get ready for a comments system, but until then, I’m gonna stick with the easy stuff. Second, I’m a geek. Coding is supposed to be fun for me, right? The PHP work was actually semi-enjoyable; HTML and CSS tweaking were where it stopped being fun.
The third problem with Blogger/LJ/etc. is that they’re really better designed for short-entry work — a paragraph or two per entry. I don’t write that way, and a page that displayed, say, my last 10 writeups’ full contents would head toward 50K/download. I’d rather the contents of my front page be readable in one sitting. The canned solutions may have configuration options to play with that allow you to do something similar, but I’d rather write code than muck about with config files.
So there you have it: BTN as blog. Any comments, you know how to get in touch with me, by AIM or e-mail.
9 February 2003 / 0 Comments / Tags: tech