New Blog Platform for 2009

26 December, 2008. 461 words.

As I’ve hinted, I decided to rewrite my PHP blog platform again. I’ve been working too hard to shoehorn features I want into the old code, so it’s time for a re-imagining. Besides, it’s just fun to write new code.

Here are some of the new concepts I’m working on:

Nano Posts. I’ve become fond of the “micro-blogging” concept. Most of the time, a sentence or two covers much of what I have to say on a subject, and in such cases the drudgery of having to turn that into a modest-sized paragraph or two with a clever title is too much to bear, so most of those thoughts go unexpressed. (Which, admittedly, might not be a bad thing.) Anyway I definitely want to incorporate the concept of Twitter-like “status updates” or what I’ll dub “nano posts” into the new platform. A nano post will simply be a short post with no title.

The Wall. I never thought I’d be saying this, but there’s actually some nice functionality on Facebook that I want to steal. In particular, I like their “wall” concept, where all of your content, be it a status update, note, picture, or whatever, is mashed together and posted in one place — your “wall.” There’s nothing special about the concept, it just expands the scope of allowable blog content. It also fits in with a long-standing goal I’ve had of adding “attachments” to blog posts so I can post pictures or mp3s.

External Feeds. Another concept I like from Facebook is the ability to import external data feeds and post them on the wall. This would be very handy for integrating with del.icio.us, twitter, or whatever. I really like the idea of having one place where people can go to find all my “stuff,” instead of having to wander all around to del.ico.us, Twitter, Google Picasa, etc.

Filters. Previously, there was the capability to create multiple blogs by grouping posts into “channels.” Under the new system, channels will go away and “filters” will be introduced, where blog posts can be grouped according to their tags. This essentially moves all posts into a single blog feed, but it will still allow splitting content into different feeds if, for example, you only care about programming posts. (It’s also important so I can send only my commentary posts to Virginia aggregators.)

Code Base. The code base will finally be moving to PHP 5 and requiring MySQL 5. (This is mainly because my web host supports them now.) I’m also making a number of improvements to the extensibility and arrangement of the code through plugins. Performance should also be improved through the use of somewhat intelligent caching of page elements. I’m also going to use jQuery to add some modest Javascript enhancements.

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