Evolving
I don't really have much time, so I'll keep this fairly short for now, and go more into what I had wanted to talk about tomorrow.
This blog - and it's older sibling the AnacondaSoftware Devblog - are run on a software called Pivot. As I've mentioned before, I've expressed desire in having more than just this blog on this site, I've wanted to move my writings over from AnacondaSoftware and have them branch off of this blog. One of the biggest things that has been holding me back on that is I wanted a way to smoothly integrate it with the blog side, so the site kept an overall congruent feel to it, not different things stitched together.
A few days ago, the first alpha of the new version of the software - now called PivotX - was released. I installed it into my test server to play around with a bit, and it has exactly what I'm looking for: a feature it refers to simply as "Pages". The Pages live in categories called Chapters, and are listed in a specific order, rather than an archival order like the normal blog system. They aren't bound by dates or time, and are listed in a simple Table of Contents allowing access to any page. They also allow for arbitrarily assigning any template to any individual page, so it can look like whatever you want while not affecting any other pages. This is the perfect platform for me to add writing to this site, so I'm watching closely now the advancement of the software in anticipation.
As it appears so far with the alpha, the first thing it looks like I'll have to address is the actual look itself. The blog is switching to a new template system, and some of it's commands are a little different. As of current, dropping in the template files unedited, the actual text of the template shows up in the right places, but no images load, and the entries aren't inserted into the page. I'll have to look into how the new system works, and update the templates accordingly.
Date posted: 04 December, 2007 Tags: anacondasoftware website_design writing
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