"Disco Stormtrooper, why not?"

I've been working on the tech that drives Riotous Living a little bit. Hopefully I will be rolling this stuff out by the end of April (that is my personal goal). I know some of the people who follow this blog are geeks like myself and might be interested in the present and future direction of the blogs software and 3rd party integrations.

Current

Right now this blog is run on a simple Wordpress installation which is hosted by one of the best shared providers I've ever had the privilege to throw my website crap on to, WebFaction. This has served us fairly well, but the Python programmer and tinkerer in me just can't let things be, so I am in the progress of migrating this blog to my favorite blogging platform Blogofile.

I've recently acquired the short domain rtslv.in for our Twitter and Facebook links for blog posts on the site. That domain is powered by bit.ly Pro and I'm very happy with it and hope that bit.ly stays around a long time.

We use Google Analytics + the tracking statistics available with bit.ly Pro to track out goals and traffic to the site. Both of these work very well, give great detail and insight in to which content our users like the best and which posts do best over time and which ones do really good at first and tail off.

Future

The future of Riotous Living is bright. I am making HTML5 and CSS3 templates for the new site design. I am using Blogofile with some custom filters and extensions to the controllers for generating the static content that will be served via nginx. I've started a Pyramid project called Riotous Tools that will provide life tools to our visitors (like 101 in 1001 lists and Life Calendars).

With the move to Blogofile we will also be using a media.riotousliving.com subdomain which will be a CNAME to a Amazon CloudFront for all our embedded images and video. This will greatly increase the load times of the site for all the pages and posts.

You can preview the Blogofile beta of the site and the developmental version of the Tools application and send your feedback along to me and I will review it and probably ignore most of it until I decide I am out of development and the versions are "stable", then I will re-read all the feedback and see if things still apply.

Summary

Moving from Wordpress to Blogofile does have it's own challenges. There is no WYSIWYG editor. There is no picture album uploader. There is no web interface to download and install plugins. All this means I will be teaching Jessa some basic HTML/RST and that we will have to maintain our own media folder for uploads and images. Overall these things are minor for the added control I get of the HTML and CSS the site produces.