traas.org

Traas.org has actually been completely re-written using an open-source MVC framework called CodeIgniter. This has enabled me to further separate my presentation layer from my database, resulting in cleaner, more manageable code. It also takes a lot of the pain away from building/validating forms, uploading files, and clean URLs. In the clean URLs department, for example, the brewing equipment page of this site, the url used to be:

     http://traas.org/page.php?pid=13

whereas now it's

     http://traas.org/page/brewing_equipment

Much easier to remember.

Coming soon: RSS/ATOM feed for blog content and photos, dynamic sitemap.xml, and improved photo viewer. Some of the old features don't work yet, notably all the submission forms (such as for email, blog comments), because I haven't gotten to them yet.

I just updated the traas.org codebase and deployed it to the production web server. What's new? Well, dynamic everything. 100% of the content from traas.org is pulled from the database, and is easily editable. That's why there's now many, many spelling and punctuation corrections. Also, we now have support for all kinds of AJAXy features, the only one of which functions is the button next to the "Music I recommend" group, which refreshes the random list of five albums when you click on it. Coming soon are recipes and my own rantings. Please look through the site, and try to break it. If you find anything wrong, please comment below.

Finally... I've been working for weeks to lay the foundations for this, but now there are blog-style comments on all of the news entries! The database design has been done for ages, and the comment rendering has worked. It was just a matter of a submission form... which is now completed. Now, click on the "comments" or "read more" link on each entry to see the comments others have left.

Yup... I fixed a few bugs in the site code. First, I noticed that robots are traversing my site, and screwing up the metrics I'm taking, so I added a robots.txt. I'm not expecting this to work as some shady organizations ignore the settings of this file, but it should cut down on some unneccesary traffic. Second, after reading this article, I realized that though my documents all parsed as valid XHTML 1.1, the benefits of such are nil unless I actually have the HTTP server pass the document to XML-aware browsers as MIME-type "application/xhtml+xml". Instead, apache was sending it as "text/html", which made tells the browser to look at the document as "tag soup", and tolerate all kinds of quirks in CSS and non-well-formedness. Click "more" below for more details...

I've added a dynamic news feature that's not completely unlike a blog in terms of function. No user comments... yet. I need to build a nice, clean, spam-proof system for that. But nonetheless, I will be adding regular content to this section. This site is really coming along... it's about time. I've had the domain for how many years?