Dev-Picayune

As part of my effort to redo the sites (internally) and free myself from Blogger.com since it seemed to be broken for me,
I’ve got Dev-Picayune now up and working. I thought it would be cool as part of it’s makeover to use a subdomain and move
everything over. So now I have clean URL’s (better permalinks) using my new blogger.com free stupid blog software.


Just to give a brief outline at how it works…

• blog entries are stored as text files in a subdirectory
• the first line of each entry is the header which is pipe (|) delimited
• the remaining lines are the content of the entry which require no special markup other than to be valid XHTML once inserted inline into a web page
• new entries are added by first creating a text file (with a manually created header) and then ftp’ing the file to the web-site
• a special PHP page that can be requested from the site reindexes all of the blog entries in the subdirectory and builds a master index text file that contains the header line from each entry
• the PHP URL parsing is used extensively to determine what page is actually being requested to figure out which entry(ies) to fetch and display
• the archive handling PHP code parses the URL and can determine whether the request is for a year, a month, or a specific entry
• to the end user, the URL looks like a subdirectory and individual pages (supposed to be better for search engines as well)
• the same index file and text files are used via PHP to dynamically generate the RSS 2.0 feed
• new features (like recent entries or popular entries or special feeds) should be easier to add using the system
• in a similar fashion to the blog utilities, links to other sites are driven by a PHP indexing page that pulls data from del.icio.us and reformats the links

Eventually I need to build a simple utility for creating the new entries without all the manual steps. Ideally it will actually sync with the site and allow for editing of old entries as well as publishing new entries.

The point is, though, that while the outside looks basically the same, the internal workings have been completely redone. Fun stuff. It’s certainly more PHP than I ever wanted to know.