Two Cents and a Thousand Words Maine, photography, technology, politics, and other selected ramblings

A new beginning… again

It always freaks me out just a little when I get so excited about a new project on the Web.

As is the norm with me, I came up with the idea to create a new format to my blog about three days ago and decided to implement it immediately. Why, you ask?

The new skin of this blog is now the same as the one I use for justinrussell.com, the main site. Better integration, in other words. New skins will be coming down the line soon (including a duplicate of the old format for all you hundreds of thousands of adoring old format fans).

There’s a earlier and later posts interface that actually works. My old blog choked when you were dealing with archives of one category; it should work fine now.

There’s a better posting interface. That doesn’t do much for you, but it makes my job a lot easier.

There’s a slick new way to add comments. You might need to unblock pop-ups for justinrussell.com (sorry) in some browsers, but I think it works much more cleanly now.

There’s better module integration. See those little close boxes on each module? Can you guess what they do? Try it. I dare ya. I’ll even give you a free cookie (literally) if you do.

It’s template and class based. My work at ASAP has taught me stuff. Classes in PHP make work a lot easier, and templates make it extremely easy to add new skins.

It’s (mostly) completely commented. Since I wrote this one from the ground up, I commented my code along the way. You’ll be seeing the source, if you want it for anything, in the future.

…and random other stuff. See the dropdown box for the category selection module? the new dates format? the new printable format? Explore. Have fun. Let me know if you broke anything.

Not everything works yet, and there are a few things left to do. I have to port the old comments over to this blog, and I have to ping weblogs.com and blogRATE, and other stuff. That’ll all come down the road.

I’m excited about blogging again.