Per the encouragement of at least 30% of my readership I've added a cleverbit.org icon. I was thinking of using a professional one I found on line but given how tiny they are it seemed more fitting to make one of my own. I did at least read a tutorial on how to make rounded edges :).

As promised here is cleverbit.org 3.0. I decided to go for a streamlined design both in code and in actual website design. I'm only using code that I wrote myself (much of which has been hanging around in one state or another since cleverbit 1.0). I'm done with spending hours and hours trying to coerce someone else's library into doing what I want while I stumble over load of 'features' that I don't really need. I've also simplified the overall design and user experience of my site; while I still favor a more organized approach to organizing my blog I'm no longer imposing my order on the user. In short my blog feels more like a standard blog now although it doesn't have comments at the moment. But a blog is really more of a one way medium anyway. Also I decided to get rid of galleries since I ended up posting most of my photos within posts anyway so that I could give them a bit of narration. A picture might be worth a thousand words but without a bit of direction how would you know which thousand to pick?

I'm pretty happy with how things turned out. Each notebook/entry/container has a bean like object which may eventually include more validation (although it doesn't include much now, horrors!). Then I have separate logic for retrieving and storing the objects from a mySql database and rendering them in html and rss. The design therefore is quite simple and maintainable and since my site is not particularly high traffic I'd rather have a few extra sql queries then to fight with someone else's optimized framework. I do still want to introduce some more content to my site but its tricky to find the time what with work and knitting and getting distracted by silly things like trying to get with svn in Eclipse to do what I want before finally giving up and using the command line. Also in the spirit of simplicity I've dropped all the icons I gathered (legally) from the web and am using only images which are mine.

Well, I've had it with Symfony. There is just too little documentation for me to be able to do what I want and whenever I search for a plugin I can only find plugins that only work with version 1.0 and since version 2 has been out since at least the start of the year when I started using Symfony I find that to be extremely frustrating.

I've spent the last weekend or two working with Textpattern but I've finally given up on that as well. Apparently when you write a new blog entry any newline characters are turned into html break tags and since I like to write proper html for my posts I end up with paragraphs and break tags. Of course I could write my posts as one long string with no visual breaks but if I start making compromises now I'll just end up frustrated in 6 months after having invested even more time into trying to manipulate someone else's product into doing what I want.

So, I'm giving up and going back to my own hand written code. Working with frameworks is just not worth the trouble. From now on I'm only using someone elses framework/software if it does what I want exactly out of the box. No more spending hours and hours searching through documentation and forums trying to coerce software written with one paradigm in mind into behaving as if it was constructed under a different paradigm. As a note I also tried Wordpress but at the end of the 'famous 5 minute install' I couldn't find my blog. Clicking on the 'view Cleverbit' link from the admin pages (which were not as easy to find as I would have expected) just took me to a directory listing of my webiste home page. Some 5 minute install. Anyway, my new streamlined, simplified site should be up by the end of the month and I'm putting an emphasis on content rather than structure and organization (which is perhaps the most major flaw with the current cleverbit.org site) and then I can start on my NEW project - reading/parsing knitting patterns and then checking them for errors, providing size and modification suggestions, and other similar tasks.

As you can see I've added and RSS feed for those of you who prefer to view my blog in your own viewer and I've also added twitter updates to the main page for those of you who prefer not to use a twitter viewer of some kind. One day presumably there will be a sort of single version viewer (sort of like a web browser...) which will let you view all sorts of stuff rather than having to log into a zillion different things just to keep up with your friends. Although after all the hard work I did on my new website it is sort of sad to think that people do just want the content and not all my pretty formatting and whimsical icons. Perhaps after a decade or so of everything being turned into a feed of some kind we'll have a renewal of individuality in presentation and not just content and people will be back viewing my website again.

I'm also working on a search/news page but that hasn't quite been finished yet.

I started work on a news page that readers could go to read the latest blog posts without having to click on them individually and I was encouraged by my husband to make it into a proper search page rather than just a most recent stories page. I ran into several troubles along the way. First it seems that the Criteria objects used by symfony only allow you to add 1 constraint per object field. Thus saying that I want the entry date to be both after a set start date and before a set end date is impossible to do with the given interface. Unfortunately this took me an hour or so of trouble shooting trying to figure out why my searches were returning somewhat random results. I've overcome this issue with a bit of sql rather than just using the Constraint->add interface by itself.

The second problem that I have not yet overcome is that the search page can only be accessed with the frontend_dev.php script (ie the url http://www.cleverbit.org/frontend_dev.php/search) rather than with the standard frontend.php which is how all of the other pages are accessed (including the one you are looking at now). I have no idea why this is and I've spent at least a few hours playing around with the routing and have made little or no progress.

Overall this experience is leading my in the direction of regretting using symfony at all since the documentation is proving to be not nearly as thorough as I was hoping, in fact much of the documentation found on the symfony website is out of date which is particularly frustrating - documents should not be labeled ver 1.2 if they contain information that will not work with ver 1.2.

It's rather obvious that I've updated the front end of cleverbit but I thought I would note a few changes that I've made on the back end. I had thought about re-writing some of my php code to be object oriented but that got a bit tedious (and seemed a bit pointless without proper typing) so I decided to give a php framework a try. I researched several frameworks and found that they were either too complicated or too lacking in documentation and I finally settled on symfony. Now that my site is mostly updated I can say that while I have been able to do most of the things I wanted to there have definitely been times when I felt that the symfony documentation was lacking. I would recommend symfony to anyone planning to do standard web/database sorts of things but I would hesitate to recommend it to anyone who wanted to do lots of odd customization especially in the auto-generated back end code because there is too much conflicting information about the different versions and not enough definitive reference documentation. Most of the documentation is in the form of tutorials which are great for getting going, especially when you are doing something parallel to the tutorial author but they can be frustrating to use as reference documents once you've gotten going and just want to look something up quickly.

Having said all of that I'm happily up to date with my MVC architecture and once I understood how to generate the back end application it was much faster than writing my own. I also updated my database a bit, mostly taking out things I never got around to using. I also took out the image tags in my posts (with a script) and replaced them with a custom tag so that I can change where the image links point to without having to modify all the posts.

I've decided to take the plunge and migrate my website to jsp. I'm going to be doing lots of re-writing of the back end and I'm considering trying out a JavaScript framework. My current plan is to log my changes here but not roll out the changes to the public until I'm finished so you can be wowed (is that really a word?) all at once.