This post probably sets me up for an awkward conversation with ClemensV on Monday, but oh well. To Clemens and the DasBlog crew -- thanks a ton for all your hard work to make DasBlog the engine that has powered Brain.Save() since I first started writing it back in 2003 (!).
However, I felt it was time to move on to a more 'turnkey' solution for my site.
I flipped the site over last night to Graffiti CMS 1.1 while I was eating an AllAmerican Slam at my local Denny's. The move was seriously that simple. I was able to use the DasBlog Import feature to move the content over pretty much automatically...all 800+ posts came through mostly unscathed. The hardest part was finding a theme that I liked. I'm not really a CSS wizard (which is probably obvious), but I was able to find a reasonable starting point on the Web and then twiddle a bit to get to a good place for now.
Overall, I'm really impressed with what Graffiti has to offer.
One of the reasons why I made the switch was the ecosystem that seems to be building around Graffiti themes, widgets and plugins. I spend my spare time hacking on code for other projects (i.e. not my blog), so I'm looking for a lot of off-the-shelf/off-the-web functionality from the product and the community.So far I've been pleased with what I've seen other people build for me :)
There are few things that I'm still looking for:
- A reasonable solution for syntax-highlighted code that plays well with Graffiti themes. I've noticed that some of my old posts containing syntax-highlighted code don't render well with the new CSS, and I'd like to get that fixed. Ideally I'd be able to do this through a Chalk Extension or a tag that gets processed on the server (<div class="code"> would be ideal).
- An "archives" page that every post I've every written, from newest to oldest (potentially several pages organized by month/year).
- Chronological "next post"/"previous post" links that appear in the single-post view
- Some way for administrators to tag posts directly from the index view, so I don't have to explicitly open each page in the editor
These are all pretty common idioms and I'm sure they are doable with a little bit of Chalk/widget magic...anyone want to educate me?
