Sandcurves

This weekend has been great, with Windhoek (where I live) getting a little rain.  Namibians get a little crazy about rain, but my wife and I lived at Sossusvlei for many years, in the Namib Desert, so rain is especially special for us.  And the first rains are the best. 

But rain can also be a problem for our internet (don't ask me why), and so I've had some bad connectivity throughout the weekend. 

But, I did get to do what I set out to do - to re-build the blog app from scratch.

Technical - don't read if you're not interested - As you probably realized if you've been on this site a bit, I built the site using Django Web Framework.  Django is awesome, but I suck at it (beginner).  So not everything I did is very good. 

When I was first building it, I was still learning a lot, and I wasn't to worried about how good it was - I was just trying stuff out.  So I did one cheap move - in my list pages (the Sandcurves.com home page and the following archive pages) I actually gave the whole post for each of the five posts listed there.  I just added a class tag and used CSS to hide it. 

That meant that each time you loaded my home page, you were loading five full blog posts, only to see a small snippet of them. Not only that, but it caused problems for me to use prober header tags (because I had to follow my own rules of hiding or not hiding, or change the CSS).

Basically, it was bad.

I also wanted to add 'tags' which I have done, I just haven't 'hooked' them up yet. 

So, I've done it and it seems to be working okay.  I did tweak at a few things, but mostly you shouldn't see anything different.  If you do see something that isn't working at all, just let me know. 

My biggest fear was that I would loose the comments, but it seems that hasn't happened.  So, I'm happy.

I've enjoyed tweaking with the code so much that I am really keen to start writing about more technical things.  I know I'll probably loose half my readers - I appreciate that many of you use Wordpress, and I think Wordpress is fantastic.  But, Wordpress is PHP and I'm allergic to PHP (after originally building Sandcurves with my own concoction of a cms).

But I think there are many of you who probably use JavaScript for small apps or simply would like to know more HTML or CSS? I'll probably not blog directly about it, but rather spend half my would be blogging time for writing tutorials. 

This week I'll be away - going to Sossusvlei Desert Lodge, run by &beyond, to do some private guiding.  I'm leaving on Tuesday, and I'll be back on Friday, so it will take up most of my week. 

Cheers

« Older Post  |  Newer Post »