23 November 2010

The new blog is ready

Well, another new blog. Hopefully I will stick with it longer than the last two, where I pretty much ran out of steam after only a few posts.

Techy Details

This time, I decided to write my own super simple blogging engine in Rails 3. While it's not much of a challenge to build a blogging engine, there are some interesting problems, like caching pages, expiring caches and a password protected admin area that help you to get to grips with the Rails 3 framework.

I short circuited the biggest challenge of all, which is making it look 'good enough' by borrowing a design from somewhere else (I don't remember where now) and using the Blueprint grid layout, which gives pretty good default typography settings.

Another area I side stepped was blog comments - I outsourced that to disqus, as dealing with spam and captcha's was more than I wanted to handle.

Keeping with the outsourcing trend, I intend to wire Google Analytics into the site to track visits and use Feedburner to track RSS stats once I get a few minutes.

One other thing to note - Go Daddy offers very cheap domains (this one code me less than £1) if you search for voucher codes on google before paying. However, their website is just awful. Awful.

The Theme

The idea of this blog is to provide a place to post ideas for web applications or businesses I come up with, a place for general software related posts and articles and more generally a place to capture all my bits and pieces on the web in one place. Who knows where it go, or if it will be interesting, only time will tell.

blog comments powered by Disqus