Today is the day that I move in, here at beatcanvas.com. If you didn't know, I'm building this site from scratch. Which means that I'm not using blogger or typepad or any other blogging tool for this. I decided about a month ago to make my own dogfood, as a friend of mine would say. I'm a database web developer by trade, so why not go for it and see what happens. I spent the latter part of my evening getting the RSS feed to work as I wanted. Woke up early this morning and got the email notification of comments going and set it up so that each post has its own title, meta keywords, and meta description when you open the page for it. Lots of work yet to do, but all of the basic blogging elements are here. At the risk of boring you with the to-do list, I plan to blog the development of the site. So here's what is on my plate: - Let people register themselves and log in to the site. This will open the door to some of the items that follow.
- Let people browse all of the comments made by registered users, regardless of post.
- Give registered users their own profile page, with a link to their own web site (think: marketing).
- I hate spam, as does everyone. Why it is that comments engines display a person's email address is beyond me - it's an invitation to spam the commenter. That's just dumb. Instead, I'll setup a private email form here on the site to email someone, if they give their email address. That way it's hidden and un-spammable.
- Allow registered users to filter the content by categories. Much like Yahoo lets you customize Yahoo's home page, this would allow you to filter out my posts that weren't in your interest, such as political rants or blogging my artwork.
- Let people choose from different BeatCanvas templates and change the look of my web site. This could get chaotic, but I like the idea. I've built the site so that each article can have its own look. This way, anyone could come here and choose from the templates available and set the look for the entire site or for just a single article.
- I want bloggers to add themselves to my links list at left. That too could get chaotic, but we'll see how I might be able to manage that.
- Set up a blogger/commenter directory, so that you could type in your US or Canadian zip/postal code or city/location and find those within your area. I haven't seen that something like this exists today, but why not? As I mentioned in another post, I built an engine for this on a different project last year. And I think that commenters should be treated like bloggers in this sense. It would be great to allow local and like-minded people to find each other.
- In addition to categorizing articles/posts, I want to create "threads," which would allow a discussion across posts to be linked together. Then allow the thread to be viewed by itself, but instead of using the blog's normal order of putting the most recent posts first, it would show the thread in chronological order.
So that's the wish list so far.Have some of your own? Have additional thoughts about this? Let me know in the comments. |
