Simple Blogging Platform

This is our first blog post

we are going to use this blog as a test and provide a little insight into how the blogs work

Plain text files

Posts are submitted and stored as plain text.

We have done this intentionally, so we can allow users to submit posts easily from various devices.

In particular we like the idea of being able to post to the blog from your mobile. This idea came from using Siri on the iphone 4s. Personally I hate trying to type messages on a mobile, but love the ability to dictate messages especially since Siri does a pretty good job of understanding what I say.

Text to html conversion

We have written a file parser to deal with the conversion of plain text into html.

The first line of the text is treated as the title and formatted appropriately.

Subsequent lines are standard font size.

Each line of text is wrapped in the html paragraph tag <p></p>

Web addresses are automatically converted into links if they start with http:// or www. www.seoit.co.uk

Email addresses work the same way, (using the mailto command) but we wouldn't recommend publishing email addresses without encoding them in some way

More than one blog?

The system supports multiple blogs

AJAX

Initially the user is presented with a limited number of the most recent posts.

Further posts can be appended to the bottom of the page utilising the AJAX infrastructure that is build into the framework

Archiving

Archiving is currently quite basic, but works and is essential for search engines to index content that is displayed to users via AJAX.

Date icons

Date icons are added to each post, with today's post being displayed in a different colour to older posts to help users identify the most recent posts.