New Website
After spammers started submitting comments to my old wordpress site I decided I had had enough. I was getting 2-3 moderation notifications to review messages per day and they were all invariably spambots posting links to chinese fashion blogs. Not sure what that had to do with electronics projects or computers, but I guess they took a shotgun approach and just tried to spam every website with a comment box. I also didn't like the way wordpress handled pages, especially when trying to make a project-oriented blog. It's a nice CMS in theory but quickly becomes annoying to manage or edit, so I found a template and started working on a new site.
Content management didn't need to be fancy, just simple and usable. I'll be writing the pages by hand in the templates. Simple, easy, and much better control over the directory structure. The only thing I'll really miss is the <code> syntax highlighting plugin. After a few minutes searching the web, though, I found an excellent replacement. In fact, it's the basis for the syntax highlighting plugin I used on the old site. It's called SyntaxHighlighter.
Installing and using it is very simple. Just download the source, unzip it, move the scripts directory to your web root, move the .css files from styles to your stylesheet directory, and edit the links in the example index.html file to point to the new locations you used for the scripts and .css files. When you're all done it should look like this:
function helloSyntaxHighlighter()
{
return "hi!";
}
I was a bit concerned to see that the creator of SyntaxHighlighter had used xhtml for his document type, as I have taken care to keep my site fully html5 compliant. None of the tags used in the example html document provided with SyntaxHighlighter were non-standard tags, so I copied the example script over to this page and ran it through html5 validation. The page still passed the test, so I'm going to keep the html5 document type.
After the content was mostly set up I registered the site with Google Analytics and got a small code snippet that goes in the header of pages I wish to track. Signing up was very easy, since I already had a Gmail account.
In the past I also signed up for Google's webmaster tools, which are very useful for making sure your pages are working correctly for GoogleBot to crawl them and start returning your page in search results. All that is required to set up webmaster tools is to register the site and place a small html file at your web root to allow Google to verify ownership and monitor the status of your site.
