Blaugust 24 final post
Brief look back at the month of Blaugust 24
As the end of Blaugust arrives, I thought I should type up a final post for the month to wrap things up.
Congratulations to everyone that took part this year. It was great seeing so much love for blogging and renewed enthusiasm for this past-time.
No matter how much I want to be a blogger who posts every day (or even just more frequently), the reality is that it's not practical at the moment. My current home life doesn't always lend itself to having time to think straight, let alone arranging all those words into sentences that also, have to make sense.
Blog Re-platform
One of the big events this year was my attempt to move away from Wordpress and dynamically generated content and “back” to static pages.
Personally, I feel that this has gone pretty well. I have hit some hurdles as the post count increased and I had to focus on getting some of the key website functionality working.
There has been many learning curves with this project, many things in the static website world have moved on since the time I first got started in HTML.
Keeping track
I now have a page to track all the blog TODO items,.I am hoping to keep chipping away at the list until the toolkit is more stable.
Next on the hit list I'd like to get the meta element links up and running, so you can see all posts related to a topic or tag. This will also be key to have when the bulk of the older posts are migrated.
Comments
One of the main features that went away with the removal of non-static elements was reader comments. Of course harking back the old internet days, guestbooks were the only real feedback mechanism we had, so in contrast, comments on pages is just futuristic.
I started the month using Comment.io, just so I would have something in place. It did what I wanted but didn't inspire confidence.in end users.
- Pros
- Has a strong focus on privacy
- Custom CSS
- Cons
- Wording on sign-up page put users off
- Monthly cost could be off-putting
Midway through the month I swapped over to Komments, looks to be a more straight forward approach that I can automate the
- Pros
- Straight forward to implement
- Has an API for management
- Currently no fees
- All comments are manually approved, don't miss out on anybodies reply.
- Cons
- No CSS or preferred colour browser default
- All comments are manually approved, volume may make this harder to manage.
Long term
I plan to continue development of my blogging toolkit, the templating has actually worked a lot better than I originally expected.
Hopefully I can share the tool with folks once it has had some more polish and isn't all barebones.