More Blog Updates

Over the past little bit I have been cleaning up the backend portion of my website. Some of you might not know but I do not use Wordpress but I have custom coded my own blog script and I try to add new features while tweaking existing ones almost on a daily basis.

I do get my ideas from Wordpress and the various plugins I crawl across but people do ask me why code my own blog when there is great scripts out there like Wordpress? Why reinvent the Wheel?

Why not? At times I do wish I stared out with a Wordpress blog, but overall I find this much more fun. I get to learn new programming techniques and have a better understanding on how blogging works. Besides this is my blog, with my code and no one else has it. Unique, right?

So for my more recent additions and updates to my blog I have done the following:

Ability to schedule future posting dates for posts - This was fairly easy to do all I had to change really was the MySQL query for retrieving my posts and ensuring that the date the post was set to go ‘live’ that it was equal or less than the current time.

Batch Uploading of Photos - This is something I am currently working on. In fact, I plan on converting it into a Wordpress plugin when it is complete and fine tuned. Currently it will allow you to upload 5 photos as a time, resize them to your specifications (defaults to 500px wide) keeping their aspect ratio, include a watermark if desired and also create and insert them into sub-folders. It works pretty well and I am happy with the results. I will be looking into having the photos stored in a table and then link them to posts so that they are easier manageable.

Adding or Editing Posts - I recently cleaned up my script for adding and editing posts, which has made it a bit more efficient for working with. I still do a rough draft in MS Word 2007 because it does help me with things like spelling and sentence fragments, but then I copy & paste it over to the fckEditor I have on my script to do some fine tweaking and adding in the images before I publish it to the web.

Overall writing my own blog script has been a great time, and I enjoy every minute of it.  It also has given me a bit more knowledge on the technical side of blogging and the ways that a blog interacts with a user.  I have also been contracted out by my older sister to help her with creating a custom blog for her as well so I can use the knowledge I have gained from creating mine, in helping her create hers.