Well what do you know, another year :p I do wish everybody who reads this a very happy new year and hope that all your endeavours are successful and that all your dreams come true this year, even though I don’t really celebrate new years and stuff like that 🙂 But on to other matters – I’ve been working on some buttons for the site in PhotoShop and they kinda look nice – but I did them at a larger size and then resized them and after resizing, they don’t look *that* nice :p I am kind of considering using them as part of the new layout I plan to use for The Developer’s Corner and then have a matching colored site layout instead of the plain white I have had all these years. Then I thought, hey why not make each of the mirror sites a variation on a different color? And *then* I thought, why don’t I skin all my sites so that the visitors can select the color scheme they want but keep the default color scheme for each mirror site a different one? All of these seem pretty good ideas but will probably take up a lot of my time for the next few days if I’m going to implement them. I’m really not sure how much of it will get implemented and how much will not due to various constraints but I’m working on it …
I actually looked into skinning my site already. I installed Land Down Under (LDU) which provides a complete skinning engine for your site as well as forums, IRC chat and a host of other features and uses PHP and mySQL. The problem? Updates have to be done in the LDU interface itself and goes into the database and so bypasses my Blog-based system. I can easily overcome that by modifying the LDU code so that the main page articles are not taken from a database but instead are retrieved either by including an HTML file or a properly formatted text file which Blog created (and Blog can do that). However, that would still leave the two mirror sites out of the loop since they don’t have both PHP and mySQL installed on them to run LDU – at least, I don’t think so. So I scrapped the idea of LDU even though it is tempting to have the whole site with one common look and feel and have all the functionality I would need in one package. Oh well ..
I also managed to get some work done on the coding front and did manage to compile Scope again after some effort. I am still not sure of the new addressbar component and have no idea whether I’ve lost some features with this particular build of Scope or not since I haven’t had time to test. I do intend to do some work on Scope soon so that it isn’t so quirky and I also need to get cracking on BlogMan again so that I can finish the work and do a final release :p There’s just so much to do – how come nobody’s invented the 48-hour day yet? 🙂
Have you looked at e107? It’s a content management system based around PHP and MySQL from what I understand of it. It does seem to be very popular, with plugins to add functionality of various kinds. e107.org