Way back in 2004, when I first launched this site (under a somewhat more unusual name), I opted not to write something from scratch to run it. No sense in reinventing the wheel.
What I picked was bBlog, an open source PHP and MySQL blogging platform. It was Smarty-based, easy to extend, and easy to administer. There was a nice community developing plugins for it and pushing development along.
Unfortunately, bBlog's development slowed ... and then ground to a halt. Eventually, the project was declared dead. And so began my quest to move to a new platform.
After lots of umming and ahhing, and after trying a few alternatives and asking for suggestions on Twitter, I decided to give MODx a try. It looked like a capable system, easy to extend and modify, and reasonably powerful.
I also decided to change my hosting package. JaguarPC had hosted my site without too much trouble for a couple of years, but I wanted to learn my way around server management, so I opted for a Slicehost package.
And because all good things come in threes, and everything else was going to be new, I decided to put together a new design too. The old one was thrown together rather hastily and although it worked, I wanted to make a clean start.
So here we are ... MODx, Slicehost, new design. There are bound to be a few teething problems (please let me know if you have any problems), but this will also allow me to add some of the new things I've been wanting to do for a while. To that end, comment replies have now been added - woohoo!
Known Issues
- Most tools not working.
- "Remember Me" not working on comments.
- Live preview not working on comments.
14 Comments
Congratulation on your new server, design and blog platform :) The design looks really great!
There are two things I found that is not working properly (or at all). Downloading cheat sheets results in an 500 internal server error. The second is that tabbing in the comment form brings focus to the search field in the header.
Looking forward to downloading your regular expression cheat sheet!
Replies: #3.
#1, Tommy, Norway, 4 December 2009. Reply to this.
As a quick followup, the tool itself is also broken (I'm sure that it'll be fixed by the time most folks read this though :)) and so are the tabs in the comments form.
Good luck with ironing out the move!
Replies: #3.
#2, Issac G, United States, 4 December 2009. Reply to this.
#1 Tommy: Thanks for letting me know - there was an Apache mod disabled that was needed for the downloads. All fixed now. I'll look at the tabindex issue.
#2 Isaac G: Thanks - I'll be sorting out the tools over the weekend and the readability one will be the first I look at.
#3, DaveChild, United Kingdom, 4 December 2009. Reply to this.
Also, comment replies are a bit wonky. Drat.
#4, DaveChild, United Kingdom, 4 December 2009. Reply to this.
Oh, MODx! Nice to read that. I use this open source system since early versions when everybody said "mod-what?"... so it's growing, to the point that the author of one of my feeds rewrites his sites and it turns out that his choice his for it.
Really happy for your choice, especially because now I can start twisting my fingers hoping in a MODx cheatsheet :p
Replies: #8.
#5, Antonio, Italy, 4 December 2009. Reply to this.
Seems like the links in your RSS feed items are not working, but if you go to the article itself, they work.
Replies: #8.
#6, Sun Seeker, United Kingdom, 4 December 2009. Reply to this.
I like the top bar that appears when you scroll down the page, just testing your comment section if it handles urls... (something I need to code myself) http://www.google.com
Replies: #8.
#7, Kevin, United Kingdom, 4 December 2009. Reply to this.
#5 Antonio: I've liked working with MODx so far. Much better than the alternatives I've tried.
#6 Sun Seeker: Thanks - will take a look at this.
#7 Kevin: It does indeed handle URLs :).
Replies: #14.
#8, DaveChild, United Kingdom, 5 December 2009. Reply to this.
Slicehost has long been one of my favorite unmanaged vps providers though I have not personally any sites hosted there. Read all good things about them until this: http://www.hyperspin.com/en/ranking.php?type=2
97.748% uptime isn't impressing at all. But there might probably be something missing.
Linode is comparably good as well which I have used for half a year now and been happy with them.
Replies: #11.
#9, Yang, China, 7 December 2009. Reply to this.
Dave,
Didn't you switch to WP at one stage? Seem to recall you grappling that.
Replies: #11.
#10, Adam Crawford, UK, 7 December 2009. Reply to this.
#9 Yang: It's been interesting watching Slicehost respond to these tests (and others) on their forums. So far, my slice has had a great uptime and great speeds, so I'm happy. I'm also in a much better position to move things if I want to than I was with the old host and platform.
#10 Adam: I tried WP for a while, but I was trying to strike a balance between CMS and blog - I wanted something article-driven, with the ability to add PHP functionality quickly and easily. I found Wordpress had too much blog functionality and not enough CMS functionality for me.
#11, DaveChild, United Kingdom, 7 December 2009. Reply to this.
I like the new template. Slick. Good luck with your changeover.
#12, Pjerky, United States, 9 December 2009. Reply to this.
The new design looks good indeed! Reading about your experience lets me hunger for own tests, but not now :-)
Besides, I just have found a broken url:
http://www.addedbytes.com/css_preload/
found on
http://www.addedbytes.com/articles/preloading-images-with-css/
... maybe there are more ...
Best wishes for your future ;-)
#13, Stephan, Germany, 10 December 2009. Reply to this.
#8 I think the problem on the RSS feeds is that you used relative url's instead of absolute. For example, clicking to download tries to take the user to:
http://www.addedbytes.com/feeds/cheat-sheets-feed/download/html-cheat-sheet-v1/pdf/
#14, Dieter Groll, USA, 11 December 2009. Reply to this.