What was up with that whole restructuring thing anyway?

Since I’ve been away, and you might be curious, I thought I would spend some time explaining what I’ve been doing with Walljm.com for the past couple months.

Walljm.com is home grown, hand coded and a grand experiment in evolutionary software development. I don’t have the advantage of using a CMS being continually improved by some group of talented people. Walljm.com was, in the begining, an excercise in code, a chance to prove to myself I could do it, and also to teach myself the skills I needed to compete in this industry.

But the problem was, walljm.com grew into somethign more than what I originally intended. The blogging industry matured, and things like categories, post titles, integrated link logs, photoblogs, and other things came about and my architecture wasn’t prepared to meet them.

So we delved into the inner workings, prayed fervently, and with some tricky sql magic and a plan, I merged the poetry, photography, and blog tables, merged their corresponding comment tables, retained backwards compatibility with old permalinks, while adding the ability to add other types of blogs easily, as well as providing for integrated categorization, and post titles.

One of the things that played prominently in the impetus for the restructuring was the idea of what my home page was. I found myself torn between wanting my site to be a photoblog, a normal blog, and at times a link log. Depending on what day of the month, my desires for the site changed. I wanted my home page to reflect the most updated content of the site, regardless of its type (poetry, photography, links, blog posts, essays, etc). Thus the integration of the tables and the categorization.

All this to say that I’m back and things are much easier to use inside. Now, whenever a photo, poem, link, or blog post is added, you will see it on the main page. Specific pages will still exist for archives of the different blogs as well. Thanks to all for being patient.