Saturday, July 19, 2008

The blog is re-born

Two months ago I added a blog to Gallery Server Pro by first creating a blog on Windows Live Spaces and then adding a web page that displayed the blog posts by retrieving the RSS feed. It was quick and easy, but had a fundamental problem: There was no easy way to retrieve blogs by ID or date range, so the page showed all the posts. I also could not display the titles for the most recent posts in a sidebar with a link to each one. I could have hacked a way to do it but surely there is an easier way.

The easier way was to switch to a different blog engine. So now I have a blog with Blogger, which is owned by Google. It has a rich API for querying blogs through a URI and better documentation. I don't want to spend a lot of time getting this blog working - I would rather spend my free time on Gallery Server or my five-month old son Skyler.

Now each blog entry is accessible with a specific URL, so I don’t have to tell you in the forum to scroll down to the blog entry on such and such a date to see the roadmap. I can just give you the link.

UPDATED 2008-07-25: While I was at it, I also added comments functionality. You post your comment using the Blogger web site, and I display them with the post. It is nice because we enjoy the benefits of comments but I don’t have to mess with the UI for adding them, especially CAPTCHA’s.