Okay, so I thought seeing as its been quite a while since I actually wrote a proper post on here, I would try and write something decent. Its not gonna happen, but its the thought that counts right?

So, right now I am working on a design for a lifestream kinda deal. Going to be hosted at a new domain name, that I have bought, and won’t be sharing with anyone until I get it live. The other thing I am thinking about doing is scrapping that idea and working on a tumblog kind deal for this site, and just letting that domain name lapse. They cost sweet bugger all these days, so its no great drama.

What I’m really trying to do is work out what would be the best way to implement either (or both) of these ideas. For the lifestream, I found what could probably best be described as a PHP framework called SimplePie, which is basically a PHP RSS aggregator, and doesn’t need to be used in conjunction with a CMS, or any kind of deal like that. The biggest problem with that is that it doesn’t cache any further back than that which Is displayed on the page. This doesn’t really mean a whole lot from a frontend perspective, but when it comes to server loads, and page loading times it is a massive problem because to have it updating anywhere near realtime, I would need to set the cache time to 15 minutes, which would mean that every time someone visited after that 15 minutes, the cache would be completely overwritten, and it would take ages for all the feeds to be pulled in - hammering both my server, and the servers where the feeds are hosted. Not an ideal solution. So what I’m thinking about doing is playing with the code, and trying to work out a way to cache to a mySQL database, updating the feeds maybe once every 30 mins, and pulling the entries from the DB. I think that sounds like a good plan, but not too sure if that will really relieve any load on any servers at all.

As for the other idea, I am having trouble working out what CMS would be best to use. I have finally gotten Chyrp to work on my local webserver, but I still can’t find any good resources for constructing themes for it, never mind the fact that they have all these exclusive terms like “feather”, “twig”, and all that kinda stuff. It’s almost like the developer(s?) are trying to be too cool for school, and the application is suffering as a result of it. And instead of the piss weak attempt at documentation they have right now (some really ugly sister to a wiki), they should bite the bullet, and install mediawiki, or tikiwiki or some decent wiki software and actually create human readable documentation, rather than documentation solely for geeks.

And that is my rant over and done with for tonight. I promise that I will try to write here a little bit more often, but As I have stated many times, the CMS that runs this site is a major pain in the ass, and my server is stupidly slow. Once the free trial period runs out, I’m thinking that its time to either switch to DreamHost or Media Temple, although I haven’t been hearing too many good things about Media Temple via Twitter lately. Investigation required.