Web Dev

So as I play around with Baked Potato more, I have ran into a bit of a conundrum. Essentially, I'm looking for suggestions on how to handle website titles for blog posts. A quick Googling and impromptu pole of various sites has not show a clear consensus either way.

Currently, my title is just the title of the blog post or whatever page your on, but i was wondering tossing my sites title (Romb.us) in there somewhere is a good idea. Here are some examples:

A. Blog Post Title (Current Style)
B. Romb.us | Blog Post Title
C. Blog Post Style | Romb.us

I'm somewhat leaning towards C. It makes the title of the post primary, while still tagging it with my site. The delimiter ( | ) could be varied easily.

So what do you all think? Think tagging is necessary or am I cluttering up my titles?

I have been vocal in the past about my feelings on Drupal and other Blogging/CMS platforms. It’s not they are inherently “bad”, just difficult to work with. They tend to become complex as they mature, making it harder to work in the code and set it up the way I want. I’ve considered writing my own blogging system before, but it becomes daunting when you start considering everything that goes into a a PHP based blogging engine that uses a MYSQL database as content storage. So why not just go back to static files?

That's right, cut out the database. Cut out the PHP scripts that generate the pages per request. Simply make a website using html files. A friend of mine (Krhanios) already does this, but he links to other sites that have the dynamic content. What I’m going to attempt is building all the static files dynamically in the background when I make a post. It solves a lot of problems inherent to PHP/MYSQL based sites. it does introduce some problems of its own, but nothing very complex. Part of the fun is figuring that all out, Right?

I by no means take any credit for this idea. I actually heard about it on Build and Analyze Episode 18 where they discussed ”A plea for baked weblogs”. I’ve spent the past few weeks thinking about it and I simply love the idea and want to play with it. So did Marco Arment , he has been working on his own version called Second Crack. It sounds great and I cant wait to see it, but he has not open sourced it yet. So what I’m going to play around with my own version I have dubbed “Baked Potato”.

This is going to sound odd, but I don't ever intend for Baked Potato to be finished. Its really just a way for me to play with the idea until Second Crack gets open sourced. You can watch me (or even help if your interested) play around with Baked Potato on GitHub. You can check it out here: Baked Potato on GitHub. Nothing will be there yet, but hopefully the first Proof of concepts will be posted. The first proof of concept is geting a file generator together and do conversion from Markdown Syntax to a complete HTML document. My plan is to have it by next week!

I was taking a gander though my web stats today and noticed I was getting a few referrals from:

http://www.konti-m.ru/index.html

I could not figure out why I kept getting hits from this site, until I noticed the “Design by Romb Design Group” at the bottom, linking to, you guessed it, http://romb.us

Apparently they are some Russian part supplier of ready to assemble furniture screws and fittings. In any case, I definitely did not design that website. I’m curious to see how long it takes them to realize it, and what it was supposed to link to.

Just a quick note, check the left nav bar over there.
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See that new link called Reviews? Well that's where my reviews are going to go, obviously. I started off with Rock Band 2.

These will work the same way as RFRs where a stub of the main review will be posted on my front page, and a link to the rest will be at the end of the stub. They wont, however, be every week like the RFR is.

Next up will be the Links page! Maybe tomorrow.

Thanks to a report from Mike i was able to fix the comment issue over the weekend. Unfortunately its something that i didn't even realize I had broke.

To explain the problem, i essentially removed the default way Drupal displays the links at the bottom of posts because i did not like the formatting. This broke the add comment link, hence not allowing you to post a comment. Its been fixed, and you should see the comment fields at the end of posts if your allowed to comment on them.

This is the style of headache I've had with trying to get a nice looking theme setup on Drupal. I Remembered i had a problem like this before, and sure enough, i had blogged about it in the past. Drupal is a complex CMS, and finding where some of the output is generated can be challenging. It does not help when Drupal's forums users seem to ignore my posts. I had started 5 threads for various problems i was having, and ended up having to solve them all myself since no one responded.

So that leaves me with a few options for the future. I can

A. Suffer though the problems with drupal and themes

B. Try and build my own theme from scratch

C. Try another CMS or Blog site all together

Sure, i could build my own CMS, i know enough PHP to do so, but i defiantly don't have enough patience to try and code all the back end features that make a CMS useful. I'm thinking ill try to do B first, now that i have a better understanding of how themes work in Drupal, and if it comes to it, find another CMS package that works better. There has to be something better now, its been a while since i first starting using Drupal.

It comes down to my wants and needs overall. I want minimalism, but not simplistic. I want smooth design, but i want to emphasis the content more than the look. And i want it without feeling like i'm somehow breaking other features.

Welcome to my new blog and homepage, Romb.us!

Consider this as the official announcement that this site is now live and ready to go. For the time being, Rombus.us (my old site) will still be up as i backup old posts from it. After a week or two, ill do a redirect from there to here.

So update your links and RSS Feeds! This is where all the action is going to be going on from now on! Also, if for any reason, you were using my old email address, the new one to use is rick -at- romb.us.

Some new changes include a new, less blue look, new smooth animated menus, and a complete and total overhaul to the newest Drupal client.

Overall, i think i have somewhere around 40-50 hours wrapped up in the theme and getting this site ready over the course of the past 2 weeks. If you see any more bugs, please point them out!

BTW Currently due to the comment spam of my previous site, all anonomus users will have there comments approved. People can create an account if they want and post without the need for approval.

I know there is not much here right now, but im going to slowly rollout new features in the coming weeks to get the site where i want it at, but for now, for blogging, this will work just fine.