Myself, Coding, Ranting, and Madness

The Consciousness Stream Continues…

Blog Improvements

22 Oct 2012 8:00 Tags: None

I am very pleased to announce a new version of this blog is in the works. I have finally got annoyed enough at WordPress, and re-learnt enough of my web programming skills, to begin working on my own blogging engine.

I am even more pleased to report that it's going very well: the public side of things is almost up to a deployment standard, with the administration side lagging quite a long way behind.

The main focus has, again, been reducing the load time of all pages. Losing all of the legacy WordPress code is a good start, and the outputted code now has a significantly reduced over-engineering1.

Deployment is, however, going to be slowed down by a couple of major factors. First, I need somewhere to deploy it to: my current hosting solution does not furnish me with a PostgreSQL database, which is the solution I chose (for good reasons). This will hopefully be sorted by the commissioning of a new web server within the next couple of months.

The other problem is, in many ways, even larger: porting all of the content. I have a radically different idea as to how posts should be stored when compared to WordPress, so this isn't going to be too easy to start with. Once you start adding extra features like comments, and thinking about all of the other data required, such as the images in the post, it's going to be quite a long process to get the blog up to speed.

Because I already know what the new format is going to be, I have slowly started doing this port. However, with well over 100 posts on this site, there's quite a lot of work, not overly aided by accumulated errors in formatting from both my shift from Blogger to WordPress, and my major theme changes only a couple of months ago.

This is all further complicated by my decision to take the opportunity to clean up some of the old posts. There won't be any large changes, but this seems like a good opportunity to go back and fix some of my little typos[note]An my larger typos, which are much more common[/note]. Some of the political posts will be having little notes added to them mentioning the final outcomes of events, and the texts will all be refactored to conform to the new stylesheets.

This all means there are a couple of practical changes: firstly, some posts will be locked for comments so I know I'm not going to miss anything. It also means that I'm more likely to spend time working on old posts rather than new ones, and those I do write ma be kept for after the transition.

  1. 1 It is never possible to remove all of the over-engineering from an HTML document.