Rebooting: Behind The Scenes

August 13th, 2006 • General

This Reboot project is making me think more than I need to, and it’s starting to affect my writing style. I’ll soon be done with drafting and start doing some real work.

There are many things going on behind the scenes of any blog, the most obvious is permanent links. Then there’s feed generation, spam filtering, administration interface, search, etc.

The first a foremost of my concerns is having a clean URL structure, I want to make the address bar of your browser as useful as possible.

Organizing URLs

My permanent links, as you can see, follow a simple and a common convention: /archives/yyyy/mm/dd/slug. I’ve heard arguments saying that this adds redundant information in the URL, but putting that argument aside, I think this convention makes sense. I can use it to view my archives by year and month by only removing the slug and the day from the URL.

Another top-level link is /tags, which filters posts by tags in a similar fashion to del.icio.us. I’d like to add /tags/something/else to intersects two or more tags, but I don’t know how difficult it is to implement using Ultimate Tag Warrior.

I already have a /search top-level link, which searches my site by one or more keyword like /search/linux+PHP, so I’m going to keep it.

I’m going to keep feed URLs so once you add /feed at the end of any URL, you’ll get the Atom feed. I’m ditching RSS as the default syndication format for my blog, and if you have a decent-enough feed reader, it’ll automatically detect the change and reconfigure itself.

I’ll be adding more URL suffixes as I go, depending on which features I get to implement. You might be seeing /pdf, /text and /print soon enough.

The coolest thing that I want to add is support for arbitrary top-level URLs. You’ll never see a 404 error again. So visiting ramikayyali.com/whatever would either you give you the page “whatever” (as in /about), or do the following:

• Search titles for “whatever” and display a list of posts.
• Display posts tagged under “whatever”.
• Display comments by a person called “whatever”.
• Search my wiki for “whatever” and display related pages.
• Display a big explanation why /whatever is returning a 404 HTTP code (I said you’ll never see a 404 error again, but your browser will).

One more thing. I’m not going to use WordPress’s links functionality, it’s too limited and time-consuming. My “What I Read” is going to be extracted directly from my OPML file, I’ll probably live under /feeds.opml.

Comment Handling

Thanks to Akimest, I’m barely seeing any spam. I don’t want to require registration and login for comments, I think it’s rude, and it’s stopped me from commenting on many other blogs. However, I’m still going to require at least a name and an email (which will not be published). Ajaxifying comments might be a good idea too. I’m already using a comment live preview, so why not take it even further.

I won’t add automatic email subscription to comments unless I get enough demand for it. It’s a nice idea, but it has a spam-like feeling.

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WordPress Plugins

This is the list of the plugins I use to run my current blog:

• Akimest is doing a great job ridding me spam, and it’s the first plugin I have on my list.
• Auto Links is helping me fill the “What I Read” section. I’m not going to need it anymore, I’ll just publish my OPML.
• Acronym Replacer, which is a somewhat outdated plugin. I’m going to replace that with a plugin of my own that also integrates the wiki.
• Feed Director is helping me redirect /index.rdf, /rss.xml, atom.xml, etc. I’ll probably drop this plugin in favor of /feed.
• Live Comment Preview is what you see below the comment form. I want to Ajaxify this, so I’m going to either replace it with something like Canary Comment.
• PHP Markdown Extra, finally. I’m going to patch a little to suit my needs, but that’s nothing major.
• Post Editor Enhancer because I love writing Markdown in full-screen.
• Fuzzy DateTime is what you see in the cute little yellow “About this entry” box.
• Make tn_, a tiny plugin I wrote myself to prefix thumbnail files with tn_.
• Ultimate Tag Warrior, I might ditch it for a more simple system that uses WordPress categories, but I’ll only decide that when push comes to shove.
• Search Excerpt which highlights search keywords in the_excerpt().

Next: Walk The Walk

This was my third brainstorm draft about my next Reboot. I need to start getting some work done.

Wish me luck.

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