Computing Corner

These posts were tagged 'meta'

Meta blogging

Posted on the 13th May 2007 by Jonathan Harris. Tagged beta, design, meta

The Computing Corner is a meta blog, which basically means that it talks about itself. The word meta means “self-referential”. So I thought it would be intesting to blog about the proccess of creating a site around a blog and premade content management system. This blog uses Wordpressto generate the posts, uploud pictures, generate feeds, searching posts and create pages. It is fully PHP/MySQL with no CGI. This means that all the posts and pages are stored in a MySQL database and not stored physically as a html file. This means when a page/post is requested lookuped in the database and inserted into a html stored in the PHP.

Wordpress works extremely well for managing blogs, it is easy to use, light weight (file size), has lots of plugins, is updated and well supported. But it is really is only really designed for managing one weblog. It is true that you have static pages shotting off from the blog, but these only serve to give more information. These static pages can are not included in the feeds or search results which is really ignoring. So if you want to have a weblog and a section with dynamic content, you need to hack wordpress.

So what is the problem?

The computingcorner has serval parts to it. It this site has the

• Meta blog - a weblog about itself and little bits,
• toolbox - a section of useful pieces of code and scripts
• writtings which is longer pieces on many different subjects.

Within the toolbox and works page, there is needed some system of first sorting a dynamic list, filting the new items onto the top, the ability to search all this content and also the ablity to create feeds (xml sitemap and RSS 2.0). All of this has to be done within a wordpress install, keeping the same formatting. Sounds like a lot trouble, it is.

This process it what is taking much more time than I thought it would and it really holding up the launch date. I will keep you updated on this proccess.

Beta Testing

Posted on the 3rd May 2007 by Jonathan Harris. Tagged beta, meta, site, update

Welcome to the computingcorner. This is a technology weblog and guide site started by Jonathan Harris. This site is current finding it’s feet and really ready for prime time. This means that they are bits of the site that will not work, links that do not do anything and other little problems. But stick with us in this stage. This testing will hopefully be over soon, when I don’t have a mountain of work to do. I am having problems with Wordpress becuase it is only designed for managing blog posts and I have lots of static pages shotting off like, writings and tools. So I am having to write my own CMS.

There is a lot of really cool things coming to this site and I have really high hopes for it. In the mean while check out my other blog called Spacedmonkey. You can also keep up to date with all the lastest posts with the site’s feed.

WATCH THIS SPACE!

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