New new blog
Having just rewritten the platform behind this blog (Wicked Words), and given that the average visitor won't notice any change whatsoever, I felt like highlighting some of the new improved features – that most of you won't notice...
The Wicked Words project is something that I've been working on for a couple of years. It started off with me making a comment to a friend along the lines of "I could probably code you a simple blog.." and sort of steamrollered on from there. It's been under a stop-start process of development since then, has been used for my blog and a select handful of others. Over that time it's occasionally been a bit ambitious (luckily my coding skills eventually caught up) and has often been quite messy (ditto).
Recently, however, I decided to use Wicked Words as the backbone for a new knowledge base at my place of work. The advantage to my employer was a system that I was intimately familiar with and could customize on demand. The obvious advantage to me was free reign (and time) to develop Wicked Words and bring it to the next stage of its development. Much to my surprise I've been able to incorporate virtually all of the features on my wish list and rewrite the code so it's almost respectable.
The new features include:
- Automatic pinging
- When a brand new article is published various blog aggregators are automatically pinged (mainly Ping-O-Matic, but a couple of others as well). To prevent blacklisting services are only pinged when a brand new article is published, not when a previously published article is edited
- Twitter
- You'll notice my Twitter feed to the right hand side of this page, but that's not all. When a new article is published (assuming your Twitter details have been entered into the database) you have the option of sending a tweet to your account to let all your followers know that you've just published something of universal importance.
- Caching
- One of the biggest improvements is built in caching (a very simple form, but caching nonetheless). This can be turned on or off via the admin panel and the timeout can be adjusted. I don't expect it's something that's really necessary for this blog given the two visitors a month I actually get, but you never know...
- Comments
- Among the improvements I've made to the comments system is a (so far, touch wood) pretty strong anti-spam system. I've only had one spam comment since I implemented this and it had all the appearances of a manually entered one. There's also functionality for replying to comments (and having the comments list arranged appropriately). Administrators can also leave comments/responses via the backed and they will be appropriately flagged up on the main site.
And the rest
Among the other features are an improved system for adding images to posts, the ability to add attachments, and enhanced security all round. As a platform Wicked Words has been designed to be XHTML 1.1 and CSS 2.0 compliant, built with SEO firmly in mind and generally something that I hope can serve as a suitable alternative to that other blogging platform beginning with W.
