Dev411 Blog

I've been experimenting with Typo at the new Dev411 blog primarily to get around the serious performance problems I (and many others) have experienced on Blogger. I know they are working on this and I hope they get it under control soon, however I didn't want to wait for something that may or may not happen so I've moved everything over to http://www.dev411.com/blog/. Typo has some nice features include categories/tags and Live Search which shows you search results as you type. Of course, I may switch back to Blogger (or to another engine) at some point but I'm hoping I won't have to change again.

I'm running 2.6.0 which is the current stable version according to the website though many people are running code directly from the SVN trunk. I'll probably wait for 4.0 before upgrading which I've heard should be coming out soon. In the mean time I've made some changes from the default configuration:

• added table of contents to pages with multiple articles (index, category/tag, archives and search) described previously.
• renamed categories to tags. The trunk supports both categories and tags but 2.6.0 only has categories. I simply renamed categories to tags by editing routes.rb and content.rhtml for the category plugin. When 4.0 comes out, I'll use the separate categories and tags and the tag uris will stay the same.
• moved categories/tags from bottom of each post to top by editing articles_helper.rb and templates.
• removed articles from uri by editing routes.rb.
• added number of comments to Live Search AJAX results by editing views/live/search.rhtml.
• added blog name to HTML title for individual article pages by editing articles_controller.rb.
• added Blog Roll sidebar which is just a copy of the static sidebar plugin. It would be nice if you could use the same static plugin multiple times but copy/rename is easy enough.

Features I'd like to add:

• Navigation breadcrumbs
• More specific HTML page titles
• The anchor slider from the Modernist theme
• A logarithmic tag cloud; the trunk version is linear
• Ability to categorize tags similar to del.icio.us tag bundles; this is supposed to be doable now with acts_as_taggable
• A tag list that also has links to tags you use at del.icio.us and possibly other places