Blog Progress Update 1

8th Aug 2024 | blog

Update on how the blog revamp is going and tales from the creation

Aside from a few teething problems with formatting and layout my new blog system seems to be working as expected,

I may have hit a slight hurdle on my first day at my in-laws, when I discovered that part of my codebase hadn't saved correctly and the USB key I had saved some drafts onto was apparently empty. Technology hating me once more.

Thankfully my friend Dok who lives nearby and is on cat feeding duty, was given a mission-impossible style adventure to navigate my forsaken folder structures and zip me a copy of the project so that I could continue while away. He really saved the day.

Style Sheets & Todo List

So for the style I am using a base of https://simplecss.org/ with a custom CSS over the top, and continued aiming to avoid using classes where possible, making the whole source code tidier. I am currently using CSS.gg for the icons and the whole lot is being loaded in at the moment but future streamlining may just be calls those that will be used.

I have been slowing working towards completing my to-do list fro the blog, first to be completed was adding of Next and Previous buttons to the blog posts. This will hopefully drive the solution for the paging on the front page too.

RSS feed creation and validation

One of the hardest things to implement was a RSS feed that would pass the validation test with 100% success.

Many of the issues were very quick to address, but one kept causing the validation to fail and it was driving me mad quite frankly. The format for RSS pubdate is a date and time as laid out in RFC 822 which was the format used on ARPA Internet Text Messages and looks like this
Wed, 07 Aug 2024 21:45:00 +0100

I looked at my output and compared it with other RSS feeds and it looked identical, I went through even inch of the RSS pubdate output to ensure it had the correct syntax and structure, it was driving me mad.

I finally got the bottom of the problem which was that the space characters I was using between the different fields was not valid in the eyes of the validator.

Using the website https://invisible-characters.com/view.html I was able to compare a working RSS with my broken RSS.

Image showing two different types of invisable space characters being used

And thus I finally discovered that the no breaking space I was using wasn't correct.