I’m relocating this weblog: As of today, I’m promoting it to the home page of my web site, https://dylan.tweney.com. Archives, RSS feeds, and everything will be moving. Please update your links — and if you have questions or comments, please let me know.
Why am I making the move? It’s time to do some technology consolidation here on tweney.com. For the past year or so, I’ve been using PHP to generate the home page. I had built an articles database using PHP and MySQL to keep track of the articles I’ve published in various magazines and web sites. To generate the home page and associated RSS feeds, I used a hacked-together PHP script that pulled the most recent articles from this database and put them together with the right formatting, text, and so forth. The whole system worked decently enough. In fact, my homegrown database still works better, for my purposes, than anything I’ve found available on the Net.
However, times change, and so do syndication formats. RSS 1.0 came out, and then RSS 2.0. My feeds are still built upon RSS 0.91. I suppose I could go to the trouble of figuring out the new syndication formats, but I really don’t want to. It’s much easier to use Movable Type, which has been powering my weblog for quite some time, and which automatically generates both RSS 1.0 and 2.0. If I’m going to use MT for feeds, why not use it for the home page, too?
Also, I update my weblog more frequently than the articles database, and I believe a site’s home page should always display the freshest content. So here I go: putting my best face forward.
