New Engine, New Design
Posted by Skrud at Wednesday, March 29th 2006 at 9:00pm
I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, and after hacking around all week I’ve finally gotten around to it. I switched my blog over to Typo. Typo is a blogging platform built with Ruby on Rails. The biggest advantage of Typo, is that I can hack it up, make it my own, and pretty much do whatever I want with it. I love Ruby, and I love Rails, and it’s a pleasure to hack through Typo.
I learned a lot of stuff while coercing Typo to let static pages accept comments (for example, the about and Dead?Docs pages). I also added loads of stuff to the wordpress importer script so that it will import static pages, as well as convert categories to tags, and some other things.
The Logical Counter-point
Why should I switch to a blogging platform that needs my own modifications, when I can just keep on using Wordpress, without any problems or modifications at all?
The answer: I needed a change, and change is fun. Learning is a huge motivation, and playing around with Rails and Typo is a knowledge catalyst. :)
What about the old design? That thing was awesome!
I got bored of it. It’s my site, I can do what I want. :P (Don’t worry, I backed everything up first). I was especially sick of the dark colour scheme. The whole white-on-purple thing … it’s so emo, I don’t think it reflected how I felt anymore.
Neither does your new design, you’re a crappy web designer.
I don’t like using third-party themes available on web sites all over the place for a number of reasons: I like having something homegrown and it’s good to refresh my memory of XHTML and CSS every now and then. I also like the fact that my site looks different from all the other Typo sites out there. Sure, Origami is a beautiful theme, but it’s not mine. If it still bugs you, send your stylesheets to drskrud at gmail.
Lies! You’re procrastinating and you know it!
I have a huge SOEN 390 project work on. It’s a Task Manager written in J2EE and Servlets. I am so sick of task management right now that I needed to clear my head and work with a framework that I enjoy working with: Rails. I can’t imagine I’ll be very productive to MyTeam if I simply continue to bitch about Java, the SoenEA2 “framework”, Tomcat, Internet Explorer …
Sure I also have a chat server and client to implement, from scratch, for my System Software Design course. I’ve been letting my brain’s passive daemon processes handle the problem-solving on that one over the past week or so, and I think a design is formulating. Accorind a recent Lifehacker article, slacking off is a great way to increase one’s creativity.
There’s also an in-class presentation to be given in our User Interface tutorial on Friday morning, but we got the bulk of that done today, and I think we’re stylishly ready.
As always, feel free to leave your comments, and marvel at the really cool AJAX comment form… :)
Wow, you really put that stuff un real quick! I am one of these who liked that wordpress theme you hacked… but whatever, change is good.
I am planning to change my theme also… I don’t know if I will be moving it to typo just yet, as I would like to learn and experiment with ruby a little beforehand. And if I’d change platform, I’d like an integrated blog/photo album/file browser content management system, similar to what Plone was, but less of a pain in the arse. So I guess I will just resort to writing a theme for it, as I hate the one I have now due to the lack of liquid layout.
Oh, and you’re not the only one ‘bitching’ on Java! I have given up on it though, as I miserably fail to understand the logic behind it, or lack thereof.
LOVE that AJAX thing by the way… OMFG on submit, it scrolls up from the form to the posted comment!!! Truly ingenious!
ajax is fun!
i like very much skrud. very minimalist. very simple. very pretty. if only i had time to do the same…oh wait, that’s what the SUMMER is for, n’est pas?
Nice! I didn’t think your new blog would be up before the summer! But I think it’s also time to change your skrud.net bitmap. :) (yes i know its your website i know)
And finally! no more are we obligated to leave non-relevant info in comments! thank you!
I like the skrud.net bitmap. It looks really nice.
You were never obligated to leave extra info before, it’s just that typo hides those fields by default.
Hey, I’m trying to do some stuff with typo and static pages myself. Specifically, I’d like to generate static pages that use the same template and theme as the rest of the blog. The best way I can think of to do this is to create a static controller with empty methods named after each of the static pages I want, then put the appropriate content into the corresponding app/views/static files. I’d like to know what you did for your situation, sounds like it required more work than my minimal hack. Let me know if you know of any better way to do what I want to do also.
Hmmm, nevermind. I just went wading through the typo-list@rubyforge.org/”>typo mailing list and found that this is what the pages option in the admin interface is for (I assumed that they were taking about the pages that are generated when your posts get to be more than 10, or whatever limit you set it to, and didn’t get why it needed its own interface option, makes sense now.). I’d still be interested in how you added comments to these pages and you should consider submitting it as a patch at the typo trac.
Hey Ajay,
My changes are all forked off a pretty old fork of the SVN tree. I’m going to wait until the current version is declared stable, port my changes over to that and submit that as a patch.
Sounds good. They’re planning on releasing Typo 4.0 within the month.
Oh man these AJAX comments are of the SWEET!!!
Cool stuff man!