You might notice some minor changes recently. I’ve had some time to do little cosmetic changes to my site, which I needed to do long ago. However, life happens and I never decide to make the time. I hope to continue with some more changes through the rest of the week. Who knows, but hopefully I’ll eventually make some major design changes in the next few weeks. What I’ve done so far:
- Font changes in a few places
- Layout changes in a couple of places
- Code cleanup on many pages
- Finally got rid of that eye… I really liked it, but I know it was really stupid
And a little list of things to do:
- Trial use of sIFR for my headlines
- Figure out how to use my category and monthly archive system
- Try to integrate more phpBB on my index page
- Clean up more of the design
- Look for different options in my bulletin board style and look
- Upload more photos
- Figure out how to use RSS, Atom, etc as forms of syndicated news
I am a huge fan of phpBB, which is what I use for my community link! Ever since I’ve been online, I’ve used phpBB on my site and plan to continue it. It’s highly customizable and it excites me at the options! However, with the lack of time and effort, my bulletin board has gone nowhere. I’d like to change the look, but I’ve installed so many different style changes already that it would take a huge chunk of my time to change it. I know I’ll eventually have to invest more time in it, but I need to do more research to calm my fears.
Because of my support for phpBB, I have found a wonderful way to integrate the system I use for this blog, Moveable Type, with phpBB. Written by fluffy, Using phpBB as your MovableType comment engine in 23847392 easy steps is a God send. It’s highly controllable for a few reasons as explained on this link, but foremost for me, I can use it to control spammers on the site as well as MUCH easier administration capabilities. Both of those by themselves make this tutorial totally worth the effort and time I spend on it.
Thank you for reading and here’s to a new year of big changes for my site!
Huh, and it looks like you took the integration a few steps further. I wouldn’t have recognized this as a phpBB form. Neat!
Though I have a few reasons for not integrating things to this point anyway; I like making it less obvious to the spammers that there’s a scrapeable form, for example, and I also like raising the bar for comment posters a bit since I seem to get a lot of crapflooders who just want to quickly post pointless comments like “I ate a burrito and it tasted like poop” or whatever, and if they don’t see a form they don’t immediately realize that comments can be posted. :)
Unfortunately, the ‘submit’ button doesn’t actually work on the in-weblog form, so I had to come over to the forum view anyway.
Hey Fluffy, thanks for posting about the submit problem! I had to go back and re-edit the forumfuncs file so that I had it working as a form. The scary thing about this is I have zero programming experience except with HTML. So, all that php in the file is like reading greek. Second, I went back to Patrick’s website for the quick reply hack and his website doesn’t exist anymore (or it’s down)!! So, luckily with a little help from Google cache, it quickly recalled and I was able to replay with the code so that the buttons below work!
I’ll probably do a little more cosmetic work on that script when I make some time because as nice as it looks, I will probably want to make it more presentational. And maybe even eventually I’ll add a few more forms for guests to fill in date, website, etc, even if they’re guests, sorta like what moveabletype does anyway. That, however, requires a really ambitious me with a lot of time and I don’t see that happening anytime soon!