I just created another blog for myself. Why have only one, when I could just as easily have two? I've always tried to keep things generally technical on here, knowing that most of my readers are here for the technical content. The new blog is a complete departure.
A few years ago, I started building an app that would allow me to take pictures with my cell phone and email them to my blog for automatic posting. But the problem ended up being fraught with complexity, and just wasn't much fun at all. So I bailed. But now with my iPhone and the WordPress app, putting phone pictures on a blog is a snap. I'll probably end up posting actual content at some point, but for now, it's just a photostream. We'll see how it goes.
This was also a good test for the WordPress management framework I've built. I host a number of blogs on my server, and because of the way WordPress works, you have to have a separate copy of the code for each blog. While that itself is not really an issue, managing the separate copies is. Enter Ant and Rsync. My Subversion repository for the blogs houses a set of config files, a single copy of WordPress, and a collection of custom themes. I use Ant to convert that into a set of complete installations, with the right themes going into the right installations, and configuring each one as needed (databases, urls, etc.). Then Rsync is used to copy all that crap out. Since most of the time little has changed, rsync really cuts down on the transfter time and bandwidth. Adding a new blog was as simple as dropping a new config file, registering the blog, creating the database, and running the Ant/deploy pair of commands.
The process could definitely be smoother, but for a use case that wasn't even on the table when it was built, it handled it admirably. Since I don't forsee creating a lot of new blogs, I don't think I'll be enhancing the functionality to accomodate that use case any better, but it made me happy that it was easily scalable in an unforseen way.
Comments are closed.