bramn.history

Version 3 Roadshow

Alright, let's get this show on the road. You've all been waiting too long already, it's time to show some activity again. I here by present to you; version 3.0 of bramn - weblog!

Version 3 of my weblog features next to a new layout a whole lot of other new goodies. To name a few:

• New webhost and another domain name
• Tagging
• More (previously there were only 2) categories and more descriptive names
• Trackbacking

Hopefully this new version will attract more visitors and just as important, increase the quantity and quality of my posts. Since the latter definitely was the biggest issue the last couple of months. Before I forget, I'm a lamer, so I'm gonna announce this weblog a live testbed. This means I'll be continously testing new features (AJAX anyone?), fine-tuning, bugfixing and tweaking everything. Last but not least, if you find any of those bugs, got suggestions or comments, please let me know!

Tags

Let's look at all the newity step by step. First of all there is the new 'Tags' functionality. If you don't know what tagging is, you've probably been asleep the last year or been offline all the time. In short, Tags are a sort of keywords you can assign to pretty much every kind of content on the internet. These tags can then be used to relate content with other content, search for content etc. Unfortunately Pivot doesn't ship with built-in tag support. It does however allow for the use of extensions, small PHP snippets that add extra and useful functions to pivot. The Taggerati extension from Marco does just that for tagging. Each full post on this weblog is now followed by a list of used tags, each of them linking to their own 'tag page'. On this page you'll find links to other related blog entries, to social bookmark websites etc. And ofcourse the famous tagcloud. The more a tag is used, the bigger the tag is.

Hosting

With the new layout also came a new webhosting company and with that came a free domain name. So bramn.com, in addition to the already existing bramn.nl was born. Together with nijmeijer.org, it means this weblog is already reachable via three domain names. bramn.nl and nijmeijer.org are still hosted at Freerider, but will be moved to the new Dreamhost when their contracts end. Most of you have probably heard of Dreamhost before. But for those who didn't, they are a cheap and reliable hosting company with lots of features! SSH, PHP4/5, unlimited (sub)domains, ridiculous amounts of bandwidth and diskspace and lots more. If you are gonna register with them, do me a favor and use this link. It'll earn my $97,- ;)

Trackbacks

Next up, is the [tt:Trackback]] feature. A well known feature in the blogosphere. Although not used that much, I hope to use it more often now I have implemented it myself. With Trackbacking it is possible to comment on a remote blog entry, by writing your own entry about it. A sort of remote commenting.

Other stuff

Next to tagging, I've also renamed and added some categories, like for instance 'Life' or 'Website'. All I have to do now is sort my previous 300 posts and assign them to the new categories. Or not...
Two of these categories have there own subweblogs on the frontpage. Quick entries, mostly not much more then a link, are assigned to one of these two categories; 'Makes Sense' and 'Nonsense'. Whether or not to take them seriously pretty much speaks for itself. Entries in which I have invested some more time or at least contain some more information are posted to one of the other categories and the normal section on the frontpage.

Snippets & extensions for pivot
To make everything work to my likings I had to write some dirty snippets for pivot. For instance, the possibility to use two different formats for 'comment & trackback links' on one weblog normally isn't possible. With snippet_altcommlink.php & snippet_alttracklink.php it now is. For the archives I altered one of graham_k's snippets. And also the Taggerati extension has been modified to some extent.

I guess this pretty much covers it all. If I forgot anything I'll post a new entry or update this one. Next thing to do now is to update the static information on this weblog. Especially the 'About' page needs some work. Also I'm going to start a centralized spot for all extensions and themes I've released for pivot. Might come in handy. Cya around and don't forget to comment or trackback!