the corner office

Every now and then I fire up Eclipse and tweak bits and bobs on my new blog design. I backed and forthed, but eventually decided to keep the world-facing blog as a separate web app from the 'admin' part. There were a couple of reasons, but one of the biggies was getting the app ready to roll while having the freedom to muck about and continue working on the admin tool. As long as the admin tool can create and edit posts, comments and so on, I don't need much more than that.

The new blog is nearly ready to roll, basically. There are some minor things I'm not sure about, though.

First is categorisation. Since the old blog gets imported into the new blog, the old categories were a design starting point. Is it worth having a raft of categories, as I currently do? Is there merit to having a tech, linux, java, notes, and other categories just to cover tech-like stuff? These are pretty much in the same line as tags, which do tend to be quite detailed, too. Would it be better to group everything into three major categories, though? My thoughts are on having a personal diary-like part, a tech category containing geek content only, and a 'blog' blog with links, feeble attempts at punditry and inane waffle. Is it worth having three major groupings and then having sub-categories? Groupings and change to technorati tags? I'm not sure, but I'm keeping things as they were, for now.

Second issue is RSS feeds. I currently provide an 'all' feed, and a feed with only tech stories. Is it worth keeping these? Stats would indicate that of the various people subscribed to my feeds, the tech-only feed isn't used much. Perhaps I needn't bother. If I go with three categories as mentioned above, it ends up with 8 possible groupings for RSS feeds. That sounds like overkill; does anyone really want that much granularity in picking a feed?

Third issue is URLs and context. The blog's 'official' URL is www.thecorneroffice.org but because I didn't have the domain when I started hosting with DDN, a number of people still use colinp.dominodeveloper.net, and even then, both the top-level, world-friendly URLs and the longer members/colinp/blah style URLs are used. The profileration Must End. What I want is only thecorneroffice.org, and I'm moving the blog to a 'blog' context. I could keep the blog at the root, but I don't know if I like that in the long run. Making the move will break some URLs. I'll probably keep the Notes-style blog going for a bit, but for thecorneroffice.org, some kind of mapping which does internal or explicit redirects is likely to be needed.

Fourth issue is finalising the CSS. The layout differs from the current design, but I've noticed some niggles, and it renders like a dog in older versions of IE.

The final issue is hosting. I've hemmed and hawed about this before. I don't want a shared server, I want a VPS. Bytemark has been recommended by a good few people. Others have suggested eapps, which provides more of a control-panelish experience, but does still provide you with a command line for when you need it. A week or two back I saw a MyEclipse newsletter with an ad for RoseHosting.com. They have a year-end special and for 20 dollah a month you get 5 gigs of disk space, 100GB of traffic and most importantly, 256MB of memory. None of the other packages offer these sorts of specs for similar prices. Doing a bit of research, I learned that RoseHosting hosts the MyEclipse servers, and MyEclipse people say they're great. Other reviews point out that it's a shell prompt you're renting, baby, with the bare minimum of control panel or assistance in getting things going. So the trade-off becomes whether to choose a largely pre-bundled, stress-free hosting service with lots of GUI tools (like eapps), or to take responsibility for running your own server and go with someone like RoseHosting. The latter is more time-consuming, but I have to keep reminding myself that I won't have nearly as much of a workload this year as I did last year, and so it might be a worthwhile learning experience to completely run and manage my own server, mail, web, warts and all.

What's for certain, is that I've got to make up my mind and get this sucker finished (as soon as possible after exams, of course).