We’re moving to Typo!
It had to happen sometime.
I finally got fed up with maintaining my own handrolled blog software. In the end, it was the spammers that did it, I just couldn’t be bothered to add all the features that were necessary to handle them correctly.
And then, a couple weeks ago, I did a Ruby on Rails presentation, and someone pointed me to Typo as an example app.
Typo
Typo is awesome. It has tons of features I want, tons more that I can play with (it’s like christmas), it’s fairly user friendly, all ajaxed up, and it’s on rails, so I can hack into it to my hearts content.
If you’re self hosting a blog and are at all familiar with rails, I give it several thumbs up. Shame I only have 2…
I feel like my priorities have changed as well. Using a 3rd party tool like typo will help me focus more on the content of my blog and less on the technology behind it. Though I will say I’ve already learned a lot by seeing how the Typo team has done things.
Shimmer
After looking into it a bit, I decided I still didn’t want to use Shutterfly or Flickr. So I’m starting a new project called shimmer that is yet another photo gallery on rails. I coded up a couple plugins for typo so that I can natively have code like :
<typo:shimmer img="2003/January/Europe/IMG300.JPG" float="right"/>
in my posts and typo just does the right thing.
More to come on Shimmer as I polish it a little.