blog building
Creating a modern blog from the ground up is nowhere near as difficult as it used to be. API’s abound to store your posts and catalog your content. You don’t even need your own server anymore, you can use a provider like bloggers.
I chose to serve my own html base template that is populated dynamically from different sources using JSON APIs. This allows a maximum of control over the look and feel, avoiding a template’d look, without sacrificing the capabilities of a decent provider.
I chose tumblr for the main post host because of their highly flexible API that i can interact with across domains. This is a key consideration if you are not controlling the server domain. I was not crazy about their own presentation of my data, but they are kind enough to build JSON and RSS feeds for me to use at my own site.
I choose delicious for the linking because of their JSON API and ubiquitous presence. They are a highly reliable provider, but limited in the amount of data that they are willing to serve to fewer than a couple kb per item. I wrote a custom function that adds the image icons to the data stored by my delicious account to further customize the look and feel.
The news content on the blog is provided from rss by yahoo pipes. Yahoo is kind enough to reserve rss as JSON. The source of the news is randomly selected from a hard-coded array. Ideally, the delicious data should deliver the sources to pipes. hmm…
another advatage of out-sourcing this blog is that i am able to post about it before and during it’s construction. i won’t loose data no matter how tired i am when working on the blog. it is a true separation of content and presentation.
More of both coming soon…
