Welcome to Anthony Rants version 2.0! It has been a long time coming, ever since the beginning really, that I have meant to significantly update my blog (especially the part behind the curtain). Writing my own blog software really started as a fun one-upmanship with Slaughter. At the time he was running some PERL monstrosity that he had made some hacks to, so I thought I should show him how a real man does it in PHP. Needless to say, I have reached that zenith in my own programming where spending hours messing with some half-baked, homemade blog software does not appeal to me at all. So... what's running now? Why does it look so similar? How are all the old posts here? Where are my comments!?
My blog is now powered by Lightpress. Lightpress is a plugin / front-end replacement for the very, very popular Wordpress blogging software. Over the years I have researched the various blogging alternatives, but each time I was pretty disappointed. Even in the case of Wordpress, which is very powerful with tons of features and great usability, I felt that things on the backend were obscenely complicated. Writing a theme for most blogging software is far from straight forward, let alone writing a plugin that extends or adds new functionality. But with Lightpress, all of that changes. Lightpress gives me the features of Wordpress within a more easily themed and expanded framework. That leads in to the answer for question #2. The site looks very similar because I implemented the previous functionality that I had on my old Sidebar as plugins in Lightpress (it really didn't take too long either).
I imported all of my old posts from the old database via the old RSS feed. Unfortunately this has two large side effects. The first side effect is that the formatting is really screwed up in some of the old posts, sometimes images don't show up anymore, sometimes links lead to wrong places, etc. I do not intend on going back and fixing that stuff. In my opinion, having the text alone, and being able to search through the old posts is enough fun. I may go back through the posts and categorize them, but that will be the extent of edits on the past. The second, probably more unfortunate side effect, is that all of the comments from the old blog are gone :-( This was largely unavoidable.
Lastly, I want to thank everyone who continues to check in on here from time to time. I know my posting habits can be quite erratic, but its still fun to know that people still enjoy hearing from me.
Does lightpress fix wordpress' lame auto formatter? I spent two hours the other night banging my head against the wall because wordpress removes line breaks, even those you code in by hand. The fix involves editing some lines in one of the php files, but not of course the lines that the developers say you change. The most mind bogglingly stupid part of this is that the wordpress developers say that any line breaks should be implemented with css. Yes please, make me type 15 characters to do a line break instead of four characters, and then please remove then removes those 15 characters with your autoformatter of doom.
Hey, you sure this isn't Matt Rants?
BTW, the new design looks all spiffy.
Jeez how many comments can I make before a comment spam blocker gets me?
A link for good measure.
the coolest site ever
I do have a spam thing on, not sure about its criteria though.
I don't currently have a problem with line breaks, but I still haven't found a really good way to indent my posts. The coolest thing about LightPress is the templates, they are just all markup, so its really easy to make a theme or whatever. The second coolest thing is the plugins, super easy to make.
As cliche as it is, adding the little darken picture, slideshow thing in Javascript was very trivial because of the easy theme stuff.
I'll have to give lightpress a look. Modifying/creating themes in wordpress has always been such a time consuming process that I've come to accept a certain look just through frustration.
Padding doesn't work for indentation?
Something about the Wordpress engine likes to remove extra spaces before paragraphs. Probably similar to the whole line break thing.
Hi Anthony, I'm glad you like Lightpress. If you have any feature you would like to see implemented just let me know, wither on the LP forum or by email.