Google Blogoscoped

Friday, January 14, 2005

New Blogging Software Here

For a while I’ve been pondering switching to a single-post-per-page blog style (previously, every post was tagged with an inline anchor), and some also emailed me about this issue before.
One merit would be people coming from search engines would not have to scroll so much, and also, I felt longer posts deserve their own URL. (Plus, Blogger.com creates URLs which seem rather large for their purpose.) However I didn’t really want to stop posting one-liners to quickly point to interesting sites, nor did I want to present one-liners on their own full page now. I also didn’t want to split my feeds into a “main blog” and “link side blog” as this would make things less simple for readers.

Doing it right

Well – yesterday, Google’s Blogger.com was down again preventing me to blog, so I took this opportunity to write my own simple blogging software (I already posted with it yesterday). I now not only have faster templating and a posting hooked up to my own database with a somewhat more WYSIWYG interface, I also have the best of both blog style worlds: for every post, I can choose to make it standalone on a single page or not. A quick link will now share its space with others on the same page-per-day; longer posts or posts with a lot of images in it will get their own page.

URL Style

Compare the two new permalink styles to get an impression of how this works:

The “n42” and “n53” in the first two samples above are made up of random unqiue two-digit IDs. I didn’t want to “abuse” the title of a post to become a permalink ID, simply because the title may change, and be too long (I also do not believe it would help in terms of SEO). All old URLs naturally stay intact, as permalinks should.

Technical background

If you are interested, here is the MySQL table* of the blog. I access it with PHP, and there’s an htaccess-file behind it too mapping everything to sweet plain “HTML” URLs.

idint
titlevarchar
contenttext
datedate
timetime
publictinyint (bool)
standalonetinyint (bool)
permalink_idsmallint

*In my previous attempt to write a blogging software I had two tables, one for the blog itself, and another for the blog posts; this of course would be necessary if you want to manage multiple weblogs.

Now, as you will notice looking at the Permalink below, this is the first “standalone” post of Google Blogoscoped.

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