This is the second post in a series I’m writing about this blog, a sort of “The making of….”. This time the status of this blog.
The main thing I can say about the status of this blog is “It works!”.
When building this blog I used the some of the guidelines from the great book Getting Real by 37signals:
- “Build half a product, not a half-ass product”: This blog’s main purpose is to help me to write. That’s why I started with building the Posts functionality, not with the comments, tagging, etc. These can be added later on (tagging is already implemented).
- “Don’t wast time on problems you don’t have”: At the moment I started writing this blog, all the posts fitted on one page (and they still do). So why worry about pagination and creating next/previous links? That’s something I have to take care of before the list of posts grows too big to fit on one page.
At this moment a part of this website is still static, e.g. the homepage. After I’ve written a new blog entry I have to manually add it to the homepage (a list of the three latest posts is shown on the homepage). Is this a problem? No! Would it be nice to have the three latests posts show up on the homepage automatically? Absolutely!
Another example, there’s no automatic ping build in right now. After a post has been added I go to the Technorati website and press the ping button. Is this a problem? No! Would it be nice if the blogging software did this automatically? Absolutely!
Because of the things I have to do manually it takes a little more time to publish an entry, but it’s not impossible.
My css is not complete, not every Textile markup element has a customized style. I just use them and when something isn’t displayed the way I want it to, I’ll add it to the css.
In the near future I’m planning to add the following features:
- Comments
- Pagination
- Ping
- Trackback
- Everything else I come up with
“Start with what you really need and add everything else later”, that’s something I’m planning on doing in my other projects also.