xhtmled v3.0
Posted on July 24, 2007 at 10:43 PM EST
After taking an over-extended blog hiatus of almost two years, I have finally returned to my home on the interweb. A few weeks ago I began working on new site for xhtmled and launched it last weekend.
Frontend
The previous version of my site, which has been archived at retro.xhtmled.com, received a lot of attention and was featured on several different CSS galleries. With this version, I decided to take a more minimalist approach by eliminating the sidebar and making it free from clutter.
I have always preferred using underscores “_” to dashes “-” because I think they make URIs easier to read, since they lie on the baseline and add more whitespace between each word. It has been proven that Google treats dashes as word separators and when the Googlebot reads underscores it will treat the entire string of words as one word. Therefore, I have gone against my personal preference and have switched to using dashes instead of underscores.
Backend
The site now runs almost entirely on SimpleLog, a content management system written in Ruby on Rails. I grew tired of using MovableType not too long after I began using it, but never got around to converting over to a different CMS.
Here are some of the reasons why I chose to use SimpleLog:
- Simplicity
- Just like the name suggests, it’s simple. MovableType has a lot of features that I never used that just got in the way. Simplelog has just the number of features that I need — nothing more, nothing less.
- Speed
- Another thing that I really could not stand about MovableType was having to rebuild to rebuild my pages. Now whenever a change is made to the database, it is reflected in real-time.
- Pages
- Having the ability to add new pages directly from the admin interface is just as easy as creating a new post.
- Markdown
- Support for Markdown is built into SimpleLog, which keeps HTML tags out of the textarea box in the admin section. This makes it much easier to read and write content. When an entry has been saved, Markdown immediately converts the marked-up text to well-formed XHTML.
Subversion
Subversion (also known as SVN) is an open-source version control system. It keeps track of each and every change that is made to your project. Once I’m satisfied with how everything looks on my local development site, I check the files into my Subversion repository. If you ever need to retrieve an older version of your work, it will allow you to easily rollback to a previous revision.
I prefer to store all of my repositories on a remote server. This way they are stored at an offsite location just in case anything were to ever happen to my local workstation and it also enables me to check out files on multiple computers.
Capistrano
Capistrano is a tool for automating the deployment of your web application to a server. It is also capable of doing much more, but this is what it is most commonly used for. After I’m finished checking my files into Subversion, I just need to enter a single command line in order to have the changes appear on my live site. No more FTP!
Feeds
The feed subscription link has changed from http://rss.xhtmled.com to http://www.xhtmled.com/rss so please be sure to update the link if you subscribe to it in your news aggregator.
On the Horizon
There are a few things that I plan on adding over the next few weeks, such as integration with my Flickr, del.icio.us, and Last.fm accounts.
I hope you like it and if you stumble upon any bugs please let me know.
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Tagged with rails, redesign, simplelog, site, subversion, webdev
Rebooted Baby!
Posted on May 01, 2005 at 12:35 PM EST
After a hectic week of juggling between projects and working on this site, the redesign of XHTMLed is complete! Now I can finally get some sleep! All of the pages should validate as XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS 2.0. The site has been thoroughly tested in Safari, Camino, OmniWeb, Firefox, Mozilla, IE 6, IE 5.5, Netscape, and Opera and everything looks good in all browsers except for the following:
- Borders in the photographs section are not vertically lining up in Safari.
- The hyperlinks in the footer of the page do not work in IE due to a bug in IE’s implementation of style filters. Unfortunately, there isn’t a fix for this that I know of unless I use a GIF instead of a PNG image. The PNG image has a much smoother gradient compared to a GIF when it is used over top of a background that isn’t a solid color. So if you are still using IE here’s yet another reason to switch to Firefox.
If you notice any problems besides the ones listed above I’d appreciate it if you would post a comment or drop me an email and let me know.
Since I just decided to redesign the site two weeks ago, I didn’t have much time to work on the site. I started last Sunday and am pretty happy with the end result after scrambling to put something together to meet today’s deadline. I didn’t have a chance to add a bunch of new features so it is basically just a facelift, although I did add a Links page and made it so the last five links that have been added will appear in the sidebar on every page. There is also an RSS feed for it that you can subscribe to in your news reader as well. I also got rid of the atom feed for the main entries and have permanently redirected it to the RSS 2.0 feed.
If you like my design please head over to CSS Reboot and also May 1st Reboot (my site is on page 15) and give me a good rating. :)
Here’s a screenie of XHTMLed v1 in case you’re new to the site and would like to see what it previously looked like:
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