littlewoodenman

Part of this redesign meant switching from WordPress to a "tumblelog" platform. WordPress is a great blogging system, and its templates and plugins make it very powerful. I, however, was in the mood for something a little simpler that requires significantly less overhead. A tumblelog is perfect in that it's very easy to post, and each post is handled and displayed "automagically," according to its type (link, image, video, etc.), saving bloggers from tediously having to constantly and consistently format their posts.

I modified an installation of the Gelato tumblelog engine, it being just a tad rough around the edges -- most  of my changes were just minor performance and usability tweaks. Like WordPress, a Gelato tumblelog runs on a LAMP framework (Apache, PHP and MyQL).

In the sidebar I retrieve my latest update on Twitter (where it says "Currently") and my latest photos on Flickr (as thumbnails). Requests are made asynchronously with Javascript, so as not to create a lag when serving the page were I to access those external resources with PHP.

Also of interest is the fact that my blog now receives no comment spam. CAPTCHAs are an offence (why should visitors shoulder the burden?) and I didn't want to maintain any kind of user registration system (which would discourage casual commenting). Instead I use a combination of server- and client-side "traps" to intercept comments that weren't written by humans and pass "human" comments to Akismet for final approval. So far, so good!