New Main Page

You might notice that I’ve brushed up the main page a bit. In addition to a few styling tweaks, you’ll note that I’m now showing the “excerpt” (short preview) of a post instead of the main thing. I’m not sure how I feel about this yet. I’m toying with a few ideas.

For the heck of it, I show a small thumbnail image of the first image in your post, if present, since photos seem to have a huge psychological draw, and they keep things interesting. I’ve got some more ideas I’m going to be implementing.

Not as obvious: the main page is now driven by Rails and uses RSS to pull in the individual feeds, instead of connecting to the database directly, because the way WPMU stores things is a giant pain for Rails to deal with.

3 thoughts on “New Main Page

  1. A lot of changes were me toying around, so if you have an opinion on something one way or the other, let me know; I can probably take it into account.

  2. Populating the table* via RSS opens up the possibility of bringing in foreign content, which is an added bonus.

    * Right now I’m just doing SQLite, but I’ll move it to MySQL soon enough… Or use something cool like Redis.

    I’ve already found a couple bugs. The first is that the script to update the main page wasn’t working.

    Also, I took a sort of lazy shortcut — I grab the posts via RSS, and then do a find_or_create_by_url on the URL contained within, and update the attributes. If it’s not changed, Rails won’t bother saving. Seems that Paperclip is set up to save the image before an update, though, which is REALLY annoying me.

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