So yeah, now that the dust has settled a bit I think I can make my first real post in this thing. I've been meaning to revamp Penguinwired for a while now, but just haven't felt the inspiration to do so. See, motivation for me is a weird thing: unless I can really control something, really bend it to my will, I'm not very interested in doing it. Also, being a complete procrastinator doesn't help either.
My first idea was to start using Blogger to publish my blog again but I soon realized I didn't want to learn a new template language. I've been messing around with Django a bit and I like the features. Basically it allows you to develop a web application in Python very quickly and without having to touch the database directly. I like that. It also provides a little administration interface where you can put entries in the database.
I know building your own blog software isn't so much in vogue anymore but it makes me happy and lets me control my site better since I'm not relying on some third party software that may have security holes. Wordpress is great, but to be honest, I was never that fond of having to set it up. Plus I can't be assed to learn that template system either.
Believe it or not, blog software is the easiest thing in the world to create. It requires very few database tables and columns and the logic for it is pretty straightforward. Right now I have two tables: posts and categories and posts only has 4 columns. I have an RSS feed which took me all of 15 minutes to set up (most of that time was learning the rss tags), plus different views like posts by month and posts by category.
I'm still debating over setting up comments. I've never inspired that many comments on any of my blogs, plus I don't want to worry about having to program in some sort of spam protection. I would like to add my own admin portal so I can use TinyMCE to make posts since it really speeds things up in regard to posting in html. With the Django admin tool, I have to write my html into my post by hand which kind of sucks.
You know what took the longest to do? The CSS. Really, that is a completely foreign language to me. I know there's great designers out there that know exactly how to bend that beast to their will, but you might as well be speaking Swahili to me. I can program in Java, C#, PHP, and Python but CSS and design as a whole makes my head spin. Don't get me started on graphic design.
Despite my limitations, I think I made a decent layout. I'll probably add to it later, but I kind of like the way things look. I was inspired mostly by the starkness of Steven Frank's site, but didn't feel my CSS skills where up to the challenge of making my text look decent on a pure white background. (believe it or not, this is actually a pretty tough task)
