Whatstyle is renewed!

👉 Whoa! Please note that this post is 16 years old. The views expressed within might have become outdated.

December 2, 2006

Phew, the new version is finally up and running. It took me a while, but here we are.

To you friendly visitors not much has changed, but the back-end has undergone some pretty big alterations. Read on to learn more...

The cons of not having a Content Management System

The first version of Whatstyle didn't sport a CMS, basically because I didn't feel like developing one (plus I didn't have the time). I figured, Since I know about HTML, there is no need for me to spend time automating the thing.

This worked to a certain extend, I hard-coded all my articles, there were no worries whatsoever. But every time I updated a single thing, I had to update n pages. After a while, I got tired of this and started working on a CMS.

Unfortunately (and of course, fortunately at the same time), projects kept coming in and I didn't have all the time in the world to work on Whatstyle, which was frustrating because I had some good articles up my sleeve.

The updates

Content management

There is of course the Content Management System. With the danger of sounding too "Web 2.0", it's still in Beta. A lot of stuff still needs to be done, but it's now in a state good enough for me to finally write some new articles.

Pretty code examples

Using Dunstan Orchard's excellent Code formatting script my code examples are now better looking and, in my opinion, more usable.

I added a sprinkle of PHP magic to his script in order to syntax-color my examples. (Note: this is one of the things that's unfinished; the syntax-coloring is far from complete and doesn't cover every language and/or keyword).

Now with RSS!

You can now subscribe to my RSS feed to stay up to date. I wanted to implement this for a long time, ever since I, myself, had discovered the magic of this great format.

Sam van Dongen made me special-thank him for Photoshopping the RSS stamp in the header.

Pretty URLS

I now use Apache's mod_rewrite module to rewrite my URLs. That way, articles are easier to bookmark and link to.

The difficult part was that my old URLs were conveniently spidered by Google, so every time I were to be found on Google, the innocent visitor would be confronted with my 404 page. Therefore, I also included rewrite rules for all the old URLs.

Your feedback

I am now shamelessly giving you the responsibility to inform me of any erroneous or unexpected behaviour Whatstyle gives you. Since every article had to be updated by hand (due to some difference in formatting and automating-scripts) there are no doubt still some bugs left I'm unaware of. I would really appreciate it if you, either by e-mailing me or leaving a comment, could provide some feedback on such errors. Of course, you may also reply to congratulate me and wish me luck ;)