I'm a curious, creative, Southern boy working in Anderson, SC. My corner of the internet is brought to life thanks to friendly cowboys at Eleven2 Hosting. If you're new here, you might be interested in the RSS Feed or Archives. You can say hello via .
I gave .com/notestoself a bit of spring cleaning lovin’ this past weekend, which mainly consisted of porting the entire thing over to Wordpress. It was a bit of a fool’s errand in the grand scheme of things, but an interesting experience nonetheless.
Notes to Self never had a content management system or database backend; it was just an html file I would handcode. This was great, because it had a small footprint and was quick and easy. The problem was I would forget about it. Even though it was easy, it was a multi-step process that would get lost in the shuffle with so many other work-related and personal projects and life responsibilities.
So, yes, Wordpress is crazy-robust for such a simple application. In fact, it will most likely prove to be too slow to continue using in the future, especially if Notes ever got a ton of traffic. But for now, at least everything is sitting tidy in a database (that I could ostensibly export/import into another CMS down the road), there are permalinks, and there is (finally) an RSS feed for your usage. Enjoy.
Ever thought of using twitter to power it?
said Elliot Swan
at 2:27am on Tuesday
I kinda digged the multi-color goodness that it used to have… Now it’s just green.
said Larry
at 6:49am on Tuesday
@elliot - I thought about it. But Twitter still doesn’t make it that easy to take their content and put it into another form (at least for someone like myself whose programming skill level isn’t all that high.)
@Larry - I’ll fix that, as soon as I figure out how to do a color array with PHP. For now, it’s just doing and even/odd thing. Patience.
said Joshua
@larry - i agree. former typography was sexier too.
@joshua - i’m blessed to see that you’re going to start updating this thing more and more. it provided great amusement to me, and it still does!
said Zach McNair
at 12:01pm on Tuesday
@joshua, re: @elliot… http://summize.com/api
said Dwayne
at 1:29pm on Tuesday
@zach - seriously? You like Lucida Grande better than Helvetica? (Wait, you’re not looking at it on a PC, are you? All type looks terrible on a PC. Kidding. Mostly.)
said Joshua
Note to Self : Watch this entire series today.
said M.A. Turner
at 2:56pm on Tuesday
@joshua - seriously. i’m on mac. maybe it’s the shadow on the text that seems very old school. that said, i still like the old typography / typography used on your blog better. by the way, smooth integration of notes to self updates in the blog. smooth!
said Zach McNair
at 12:53pm on Wednesday
Question: Could you have integrated your Notes to Self within your current Wordpress installation in /blog and then displayed them separately on /notestoself rather than giving /notestoself it’s own, separate Worpress installation? Would that have been more simple?
This might make updating easier, but I could see my suggestion being a problem with inputting old Notes to Self in your current Wordpress installation on /blog.
said Nathaniel Buck
at 11:27am on Thursday
Yes, I could have. And yes, it would have been more simple.
But… 240ish new posts would have shown up in your RSS reader in one day. And I wouldn’t be able to easily remove those posts from the database to port to another CMS in the future.
But more than that, I want to keep most of my subpage and external site content separate, except in occasional instances. They each have different purposes, audiences, and content; they just happen to all be somewhat related to me.
said Joshua