I’ve been making lots of big changes behind the scenes here at the adactio journal. With any luck, you won’t notice any of them.
I’ve switched over to using the same blogging framework I’m using for the DOM Scripting site and Principia Gastronomica. It’s a simple home-rolled affair that uses PHP and MySQL.
Up ‘till now, this site wasn’t using any database at all. Instead, journal entries were stored as XML files. In theory, this would allow a lot of flexibility in the formats I chose to output. In practice, I was only outputting XHTML and RSS.
One of the nice things about using MySQL to store my journal entries is that I can use full-text searching. It wasn’t much of a consideration when this journal kicked off back in 2001, but with almost five years worth of entries, a decent search function has become a priority.
Switching the data from separate files containing XML over to a database table containing XHTML was pleasantly painless. The real challenge was avoiding linkrot. This new CMS uses a nice short URL structure where the old system was quite verbose. I needed to make sure that inbound links to old entries would still work. With a little bit of pattern matching and redirection, I think I’ve got everything working okay. If you find any broken links, let me know.
If you’re reading this in an RSS reader, it’s worth noting that the URL for the RSS file is now http://adactio.com/journal/rss. The old URL will continue to work though.
This new CMS has commenting all set up and ready to roll. I’m almost tempted to use it. I still maintain that comments would be pointless on most of the entries here (and I’m busy enough overseeing everything that gets posted over at The Session), but who knows? Maybe I’ll turn on comments for the occasional entry or two.