Site moved & New Blog App

Last month, I annouced the move of my pro­fes­sional web​fo​cus​de​sign​.com site from another host­ing com­pany to HostMySite. That move has com­pleted with­out issues so, last week I also moved this site to HostMySite and at the same time I decided to try another blog­ging application.

I used to use Ray Camden’s BlogCFC which is a ter­rific (and free) blog appli­ca­tion but I wanted some func­tion­al­ity that it doesn’t have yet, like track­backs, and pings from indi­vid­ual posts. I also wanted some more exten­sive admin­is­trat­tive fea­tures (through a Web GUI) and I decided to try BlogFusion 4.0.6 and it has all the fea­tures I wanted and then some. Its admin­is­tra­tive GUI is absolutely fan­tas­tic and it installs with the FCKEditor right out of the box. The copy I had installed into BlogCFC had stopped work­ing and I couldn’t fig­ure out why. Although not free, the devel­oper has a spe­cial for non-​commercial use where you can get BlogFusion for $5.00.

The draw­back with BlogFusion is that the ColdFusion code under the hood is much less efi­ciently writ­ten that Ray’s BlogCFC code and, as is typ­i­cal with many back­end devel­op­ers, the front end HTML and CSS code it gen­er­ates out of the box is less than ideal (to be polite…) I had to spend many hours mod­i­fy­ing the basic BlogFusion skin tem­plates to fit the design of pix​e​lyzed​.com and make it out­put decent HTML code. This is an ongo­ing task and I’m not quite fin­ished yet but I’m get­ting there. I also had to make many mod­i­fi­ca­tions to BlogCFC’s code but there was fewer tem­plates to deal with and Ray’s code is far more mod­u­lar with a lot less busi­ness logic mixed in with the HTML code. It was a lot eas­ier to deal with.

I think the extra work with BlogFusion was worth it for the addi­tional func­tion­al­ity and flex­i­bil­ity it affords me. As I get to kow the app bet­ter it will prob­a­bly get eas­ier to mod­ify it. I can exper­i­ment with­out break­ing any­thing as switch­ing from one skin to another is quite easy. Blogging itself is also quite new to me even if I’ve been read­ing blogs (through FeeDemon) for quite a while now. It took me long enough to fin­ish this site in my spare time but I’m finally get­ting there…