Social bookmarks

The way to promote websites these days tends to be through social networking; typically, sites like del.icio.us, digg, reddit, etc. If a user enjoys what you write, it’s gotten incredibly easy for them to “spread the word.” Thus, I wrote a bit of php that takes the article name and generates handy bookmarks like you see on so many blogs today. I use my del.icio.us account pretty extensively, and if you haven’t tried it, you should. Nothing will replace having a good bookmarks toolbar, but for all of those “interesting” sites you don’t visit every day, del.icio.us is invaluable.

Search and Navigation

As per my original goal, I wrote a search box that will search my blog using the google engine, and has an option to search the web instead. Unfortunately, squashing a css bug in the nav/search bar made the (previously working) search box not show for IE users until I came back to the problem a week later. The top bar would slide past the rest of the content when the screen size was narrower than the columns (about 870 pixels). One thing I learned is that putting <div> inside of a <p> element breaks xhtml compliance. Go figure.

CSS Debugging

As a corollary to “Search and Navigation,” one of the most egregious problems I’ve had to deal with is buggy CSS; you change one thing, you break another. The afformentioned search bar bug was the most recent example. That took gutting the css for that section, and rebuilding it. The only problem? The search bar didn’t show up in IE. I called it a night, came back a couple days later, and knocked the problem out. Lesson learned: when you try and fail, take a break from the problem. It also taught me that I don’t know CSS as well as I thought I did. The code isn’t perfect, but it does what I want it to now.

RSS

Learning how to create a proper RSS feed has been interesting. Of great use was the Feed Validator. I started out with the basic definition; a channel, an item, a link, and a description. Then the validator said I needed to fix a few things:

• Add the string “AddType application/rss+xml .rss” (sans quotes) to my httpd.conf
• Add the <guid> element to make sure rss readers didn’t misread entries. I wish ThinkGeek would learn about that one, because I’d get what felt like three duplicate items from their feed every day.
• Add the <pubDate> tag; without this, a newsreader identifies the feed item as dated whenever it was downloaded. It’s not required for valid rss, but it’s nice to have.
• Add the <ttl> tag; it specifies how often a newsreader should check a feed. As I don’t update that often, it’s unnessasary for a newsreader to check every four seconds.

To see all of these improvements in action, take a look at the source of my rss feed.

What’s next?

I’ve definitely been saving the harder things for last:

• SQL back-end. I know that the more interesting modern websites are front-ends to databases, but I don’t really know where to begin on this one. I know it will involve creating a database and placing my articles in it, and then using PHP to load the articles from the database upon request.
• Comments. Comments are sort of a collary of the SQL problem. Once you’ve got a database of articles, each article can have its own database of comments.
• Flash. I’d like to find something that looks as nice as the static flash text, but doesn’t require a plugin. Images will probably work, but that will take time to do. Also, I’m not keen on generating an image for every article that I write.
• CSS Cleanup. I’m not using all of that crap, so it’d probably be a good idea to clean up and comment the code wherever possible.

Design

After months of reading about the death of tables for formatting, I decided to redo the website I made in “Computing for Engineers.” This time, it’d be beautiful. There’s not a single table in this website so far. While it’s true that I did borrow some, the website you see now is relatively close to the way I pictured it.

One of the most difficult choices was between two and three columns. Ideally, I will make a two-column layout and use it for articles; there just aren’t that many uses for the other two columns on article pages.

Graphics

For the banner/title graphic, I went through my deviantArt gallery looking for an image I feel represents me. Eventually, I settled on the female wallpaper “Fractal Goddess.” Careful cropping and coloring to fit the black/green color scheme has given me something that works well. Other graphics were created or (more likely) borrowed as needed.

Code reuse

There are a few things I don’t know how to do yet. I’m relatively new to PHP, but I was able to use it to simplify development. Throughout the website, the header, footer, right column, and “quick links” are each included at the server. Maintaining a “quick links” section spread across several pages is simply bad design. Ideally, all of the common elements of each page would be included from some file or another. Ideally, I’ll find and read a guide to good webpage design using PHP.

What’s next?

Search Upgrades. The search box searches google for whatever you put into it. There’s an empty space that I intented on putting a “web/this site” radio button in, but that’s in a separate div section. Anyone who can figure that one out gets a cookie. Update 10.02.2006: This has been fixed.

Social networking. Quick links to post an article or page to del.icio.us, digg, etc would be a good use for the middle column. Update 10.03.2006: This has been fixed.

Comments. I think that a way for users to comment on articles would drastically supplement this blog. Unfortunately, I don’t know where to go on that one. That might be a potential use of the second column in articles.

A new day has dawned.

Literally, it’s one in the morning. Figuratively, I’ve got the framework to share (and learn) knowledge in things I hold dear to me.