23 November 2010
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.
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 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.