Good to be Back
Been a really long time since I’ve written here. I’ve been planning on writing this brand new blog engine and one day I will but for now it’s only been distracting me from actually blogging which has actually been a New Year’s resolution of mine. But ohh well. I’m back now and that’s what matters.
Figure I might as well go ahead and talk about that blog engine because maybe it’ll go ahead and motivate me to finish it.
The blog engine
Been reading Marco Arment’s blog a good amount lately and have been loving the way he’s able to do commentary on articles by linking to the article and then writing a little summary of it. Sure I could hack it into Wordpress or even Ghost (which I use for this blog but I’m a geek so where’s the fun in that). I also wanted the ability to embed Youtube videos and Soundcloud links as well as to just have long posts or simple quotes.
Sounds kinda like tumblr, right? Yeah that’s what I thought too but it’s not open source and I just don’t want to get invested in a closed system for something that’s so personal as a blog so I made my own. Actually had two different attempts at this software since I thought it up in Octoberish.
V1
Started this one with a MEAN stack since I wanted to learn more about Angular. Got about as far as a really basic interface before I realized how much I hate Angular and thought it might be overkill for my project
V2
Just used a Mongo-Express-Node stack since, like I mentioned, I don’t like Angular. Got a hair further than I did on V1 before school got in the way. Implemented the different post types and a basic interface. Let’s check out some screenshots!
This is the main screen. You can see the basic 2 column layout I decided on. Also on display are some of the post types: Status, A long blog post, Quote and a Youtube embed.
This is the main screen continued. Here you can see another Youtube embed and, one of my favorite features, a Soundcloud embed!
Please fogive the horrific lack of styling but this is the admin page! From here you can create any type of post you want to.
As you can see it’s very much a work in progress. There are some things I still want to finish up before I even consider moving my blog over to it aka my checklist of things to do.
- Actually have authentication for the admin page
- Have URLs for each post so that they can be shared
- Style the admin page and the rest of the site
- Make the admin page less complicated by removing fields
So yeah still a lot to do but I’m working on it. Ever so slowly perhaps but working nevertheless!
Hopefully my next post wont take as long to come out! Have a few ideas for posts that hopefully I’ll write pretty soon!