February 06, 2007

Rohit's Realm, Redux

More than two years after writing a road map to clean up my web presence and more than a year after falsely claiming to have accomplished these goals, I have finally come through on my promise. Rohit's Realm is dead! Long live Rohit's Realm!

Despite popular opinion to the contrary, I was not building a Vista-esque web site that took over three years of coding. I was just busy, or lazy, depending on your perspective. Version 2.0 of Rohit's Realm, or V2 as it is affectionately known within my lexicon, is a marked change from the Rohit's Realm that you, dear reader, have likely come to know—and despise—over the past three years. Below, I have tried to summarize the substantial changes that V2 boasts relatively to its miserable predecessor, henceforth known only as V1.

The changes in this version are anything but cosmetic, though that will likely be the first thing you notice. Besides the obvious changes in look and feel, some major front-end changes (i.e., relevant to you) include:

• Atom 1.0 support
• Re-factored RSS 2.0 feed
• Support for archives by day and month
• Categories!
• New subdomain for photos: photos.rohitsrealm.com and a working RSS feed; yes, I know the gallery has changed locations several times in the past few months...sorry
• Archives supporting entry title, rather than entry id. So, for instance: the archive for this entry will be http://www.rohitsrealm.com/archive/2007/02/06/rohits-realm-redux/ rather than http://www.rohitsrealm.com/archive/2007/02/284.html
• A little AJAX (just so I can continue being a poseur)

Those are just the changes you can see. On the back-end, this is a complete, top-down redesign/rewrite of everything from the blogging engine forward. Why re-invent the wheel (again)? you might ask. There are indeed plenty of stable, open source blogging platforms now freely available on the Web. It's not a bad question, and frankly, I do not have a good answer. Suffice to say: I'm a nerd; I like programming; I wrote my own blogging software. Deal with it.

As with any new software, there are bound to be a myriad of bugs, especially considering my QA team consisted of me and occasionally, my sister (when I could convince her to help me). If you find anything wrong, please please please let me know: webmaster at rohitsrealm dot com. Long live Rohit's Realm!