New Blog Structure

Fri Sep 05 17:37:26 EDT 2014

Tags: blog

So I finally got around to re-doing my blog app after letting the previous one wither on the vine for years. The main things this new template has over the previous one are:

  • A properly responsive design care of WrapBootstrap. Conveniently, it's the same design I use for our internal task-tracking app, so I had most of the renderers ready.
  • Along those lines, the XSP structure is heavily based on standard/ExtLib components when at all possible, rather than putting the Bootstrap structure into the page code.
  • I've also switched it to being based on the frostillic.us Framework, which I'd darn well better, since it's the name of the blog.
  • I've finally separated the app and data NSFs, which I should have done a long time ago.
  • I'm trying out a RequestCustomizerFactory combined with some web rules to generate somewhat-better URLs while still writing the normal ".xsp" page names and query strings in the XSP code itself, so it remains portable. I'll have to go into how I'm doing that eventually... and I'll also have to expand how it works to cover RT data as well.
  • I put an actual license statement at the bottom of the page (again: finally).
  • Translation support for the app UI if I bother to add that.

One thing it doesn't have is any amount of professionalism in the development and deployment: it's the work of part of the last couple days and accordingly lacks a lot of even basic features (tags, threads, a proper search UI, etc.) and is probably buggy as sin. Still, I wanted to get something shipped instead of letting it linger forever. I've got a reasonably-lengthy TODO list in mind. As expected, it's been a good exercise in finding out what I still need to do both in the Framework and in my renderer.

For those curious, the code is up on GitHub:

https://github.com/jesse-gallagher/frostillic.us-Blog

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