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GamerTag
The rarely updated blog of Joel Dixon
Saturday, August 18, 2007
Welcome to joeldixon.com - it's the web 0.9
# Posted by Joel Dixon at 18/08/2007 05:19:16As I stated way back when, I had always figured I would have a blog eventually - but I had originally assumed I would have coded the blog website myself as a programming exercise (being, at that point, new to PHP and MySQL). I originally signed up to Blogger to comment on a few people's blogs, and I started making posts while developing my own Blog website. As is common with other "coding for fun" projects of mine, the process dragged on a lot longer than I had originally thought. It's funny, part of the reason I didn't want to "settle" for Blogger's software was the lack of a few key features I wanted (such as tags, image uploads etc). Sure enough - by the time I had completed my site, Blogger gained most of my wanted features, and more.
But anyway - it's finally finished - and hopefully it will convince me to blog more often while in Edmonton. Some of the key features that I wanted include:
- - URLs for my blog entries include the date of publication and title of the blog post (i.e. http://www.joeldixon.com/blog/entry/2007/08/09/day-1-in-edmo nton). I'm often reluctant to click an anonymous blog post when the url is something like http://example.com/blog?entry_id=12 or http://example.com/blog/12). I also wanted, as much as possible, for the URLs to make sense - like http://www.joeldixon.com/blog/archive/2005/page/2.
- - I personally like HTML, so I wanted commenters to be allowed to use (limited) HTML tags, as well as the common BBCode rip-off that most sites provide. This includes image linking for comments, and image uploads for blog posts. Oh - and you gotsa have smilies
- - Originally Blogger only allowed members to post with an email or website address. I wanted to provide an option to register to the site (manage your profile, keep track of post count etc) for commenting - but also allow anonymous comments provide a name, email address and home page. Sure, spammers may eventually enjoy this feature - but I can set individual blog posts to require a captcha (generally only 1 in 50 of my old blog posts generated any spam).
- - A pretty neat feature I blatantly stole from my little brother (though his is much fancier in terms of animation), I wanted the ability to allow quick comments on blog posts from the main page of the site. Also, I wanted to allow a "Preview" button - mainly because of the number of times I've stuffed up the formatting one one of my blog comments.
- - (oh my!) Blog tags are pretty cool, but I also wanted a way to keep my geeky technical and gaming posts separate from the suave travelings of a jetsetter (because, like, there's so much more to me). The home page still shows all sections combined, but I will probably provide an RSS feed for each section if demand requires.
- - Another piece of website thievery, I wanted to be able to see the last five comments or so on my homepage with ease. The blog search is also something that helps when when I think "I know I've typed this before" - though as it was the last feature implemented, it's really dodgy at present.
- - Most coded-at-home blog sites have a dynamically generated RSS feed that gets created each time it is requested (i.e. I go to the RSS feed's page, it goes to the database to get the last 20 posts then outputs the results as XML). The problem with this approach is that some RSS clients request the XML feed in great frequency to check if anything's been updated. Even with as limited a readership as mine, these requests can add up and really slow down the database. Instead, I've made it so a physical XML file is saved to my website each time a blog post is updated, or a future-dated blog post is made active. This file generation is slower than a simple database request being returned as XML, but if history is anything to go by, my post frequency is nothing to worry about!
I'm probably leaving out heaps of features that took plenty of time and heaps of head scratching, but I'm sure you get the idea.
So register to comment, sign up to the RSS feed and stay a while!
# Posted in the Technical section and tagged as: Web
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Comments
| Dieter |
Apartment Nice looking apartment, pretty fine view! Hows the rent compare to Melb? As you know a small inner city piece of s### will cost big dollars. # Posted - 07/09/2007 08:07:33 |
 joeldixon   Posts: 156 |
That's a good point Diet. I am downtown (close to the middle of the city, but also close enough to the University of Alberta), near public transport, nice neighbourhood (haven't yet seen a "lady" of the night near my place) - and rent is only $1,100 a month - which would be good in Melbourne (as far as I know). Most people that ask how much I'm paying indicate that $1,100 is actually quite expensive in Edmonton. I was just happy to find a place - Edmonton has very few apartments available atm.  # Posted - 07/09/2007 09:56:16 |
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