FoodieView Recipe Search Engine – “The Recipe Search Engine searching over 110,000 recipes and counting…”
Archives for September 2005
FontExplorer X
Linotype has released the beta of FontExplorer X. The app holds a lot of promise, and has a the Web and design communities drooling in anticipation. Could it be a replacement for both Fontbook and Suitcase? I sure as hell hope so. Check out the comparison chart to see for yourself (bring your own grain of salt). The fact that it is free only serves to send happy shivers down my spine. I can’t wait to show this to Sarah! – As pointed out by Jason Santa Maria
A CSS Template
Faruk Ates provides a handy style sheet to use when starting a new project, and provides some great information as to the choices made, and the revisions since the first launch. I plan to check it out, and perhaps revise my standard CSS template with his ideas.
Found via Jeff Croft
Subtraction: The Funniest Grid You Ever Saw
Subtraction: The Funniest Grid You Ever Saw – “Believe it or not, underlying every page of TheOnion.com are sixteen columns of 42 pixels each, separated by fifteen gutters (the empty white space between) of 10 pixels each, plus an additional, outsized column for the left-hand navigation. It’s an almost absurd number, I know, but it has a real purpose, because these pages are sufficiently complex that the practice of laying out elements on them requires lots of guidance.”
CMS for Apocalyptic Dreaming
I need to revamp the aging Apocalyptic Dreaming, as its current incarnation is three and a half years old. While there are some tempting whiz-bang features available in content management systems these days, all I really want is to:
- make it easier for a user submission to be posted to the site – right now, the submissions are e-mailed to me, then I cut and paste them into MovableType
- add threaded comments – the site has just under 1200 comments across about 400 entries
- refresh the design – the current 800 x 600 constraints need to be eliminated and the table-less design was one of my first, so it isn’t anywhere near as efficient as I would like
In addition to these key changes, I also need:
- The ability to port the existing MT entries into the new system
- The ability to easily modify the layout via a template system – having to modify the systems core files to eliminate markup is a bad thingtm
- The ability to set up multiple authors/moderators
- The ability to categorize entries under multiple sections
- Many more points that are inferred by their existence in systems like MT and WordPress
I’ve mentioned MT and WordPress throughout this post and I am familiar with both, but I don’t think either is quite right for Apocalyptic Dreaming. I would spend too much time tweaking and bending code to make it work the way I want, when I could utilize systems that are meant to serve communities like AD. I have given a cursory look at Mambo ( the forked version was renamed Joomla) and Drupal. Both appear promising, but I do not have any experience with either one. The fact that the Mambo team has just split worries me somewhat, as I want to choose a system and stick with it.
So, does anyone out there have any recommendations? It doesn’t have to be one of the packages mentioned above, but it does have to meet these technical requirements:
- PHP 4.x
- MySQL
- Produces semantic (X)HTML – or allow me to easily modify the templates
- Produces clean, search engine friendly URLs
- Solid and devoted user/developer community
Some additional information and perspectives are available at Asterisk and BusinessLogs , which I have found to be useful in my own research.