About this blog (2): Status

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:

  1. Comments
  2. Pagination
  3. Ping
  4. Trackback
  5. 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.

About this blog (1): Custom Made

In my first post I promised to write some more about this blog and how I created it. I’m going to write a few posts about this subject, so let’s start with the first one: Why I use custom made blogging software.

Before creating my own blogging software I looked at a lot of out-of-the-box products or blogging platforms (why reinventing the wheel?).

Because I’m on a journey from Java development to Ruby on Rails development I specially looked at the Rails based blogging software, like Typo, Mephisto and SimpleLog. There are a few reasons why I decided to build my own blog from scratch:

  1. I wanted a simple blogging app. Not one with which I could maintain my complete website. Just use it for the weblog and integrate it into the website (which is also a Ruby on Rails app). This must be possible with the three programs I looked into, but all the tutorials and howto’s I found were based on building a standalone weblog.
  2. For another project I’m working on I needed the possibility to create a lot of (small) weblogs. In Mephisto it’s possible to create multiple pages which behave like a weblog, but I needed a weblog which is related to a user.
  3. I’m not that experienced with Ruby on Rails and building your own blogging app seems to be a good start 😉

Next time I’ll tell some more about the status of the software and what still needs to be done.

Google geo developer day

Yesterday I got a phone call from Google. The lady on the phone said Google is organizing a Geo developer day in Amsterdam somewhere in march. She asked me to whom she could address the invitation.

After the call I realized I didn’t ask for the precise date, so I guess I have to wait for the invitation. I can’t find any information about this developers day on the web.

The lady said she got my phone number from this website. Probably the Stemlocaties Amsterdam page (Google Maps mashup with all vote locations for the Dutch General Elections) got their attention somehow 🙂

update 1: Today (March 1) I got the invitation, so now I know the date :-). The program looks very interesting, so Google count me in!

update 2: Read my report about the GeoDay

My first Post!

Build a real site for my company, that was on my todo list for a long time. And now it’s finally here! To celebrate this joyful event I’m also starting a weblog as of today.

I never had a weblog before, so I guess I have to find out what I want to write about.

Because this blog is part of the website for my company Million Pieces, most of my writings will be business-related. About the projects I’m working on, the tools I’m using, the programming languages I write my applications in, but also about running an internet business in the Netherlands.

A few other things I’m planning to write about are things I personally love, hate, am worried about, like beautiful code, privacy, copyright, mashups, etc. (You have to keep on reading this blog if you want to find out which of these I love, hate or am worried about ;-)).

Next few days I’ll write a bit more about my company and about this website (how it’s been created).