Journey to overhaul Blogger to produce something Unique
Since starting JS Blog Stop nearly a year ago I've spent a lot of time experimenting with Blogger and Google services. I wanted to see how much I could achieve using their free tools to complete projects for which they were not designed. Most of this time Blogger was the chosen test bed and I think I've learned quite a lot over the months and shared some interesting tools with everyone. Still, being a developer with a background in server side programming I've found the platform a bit restricting and difficult to work with. Most of this centers around the online templates and I've been searching for a better way to work.Over the past few weeks I've done a lot of research and development with Dojo Toolkit and Less CSS with a Twitter Bootstrap foundation. I have to say Less CSS is fantastic and light years easier to work with as a developer than the template skin Blogger uses. I get the same kind of power with stored variables, but also get to mix in multi-browser support for CSS3 features through reusable single line commands. It's really phenomenal how much more quickly I can churn out CSS effects. Although this functionality comes at a price, no more template designer, I'm happy with the trade off.
Dojo I'm still only scratching the surface of. Much of the past year I've experimented learning advanced JavaScript programming techniques. If you look at the script source on this site, you'll notice the early ones look drastically less advanced than the more recent. Still, with a background in Object Oriented programming I've had a real struggle to find the right design patterns to fit the way I like to organize code. I think I've finally found a solution with Dojo's OO tools, specifically dojo.declare(). I get to use object literals with object inheritance without digging too deeply into the prototypal patterns I find so ugly to look at. I really like it so far.
My Portfolio Site
I've not posted to this site for some time, mostly because I've been doing the research I mentioned and developing a portfolio site using Blogger. This site doesn't resemble a blog at all. If not for the url, I haven't registered a domain yet, you'd be hard pressed to tell it's a Blogger site by looking. This is a total conversion with a custom Blog widget as the one and only widget. Everything else is done through my custom JavaScript classes and CSS. It is just about feature complete, though I want to smooth out the look of a few things and I need to include a good deal more content. Still, I'm quite happy with the results thus far and wanted to share. My Portfolio SiteHere's a quick run down of some of the features I built into the portfolio all of which are custom built, not plugins someone else designed and coded:
- Feature fade rotator, label driven
- Sliders with or without controls, label driven with multiple templates
- Custom Google Docs form with hidden submission to look like an AJAX form
- Custom Blog widget allowing a Landing page and customized item pages
This is a short list of the work done, but the rest is pretty technical and hidden within the compressed compiled template code.
Conclusion
This is one of the projects which has left JS Blog Stop fairly quiet the past several weeks. My focus is a lot more in this direction when it comes to Blogger lately. I'll try to find something interesting and useful to post later. Until then, take a peek at what I've been working on and thanks for reading.
4 comments :
WOW...no public and share...wekekkeke :D
awesome master \m/
Hi James,
I guess you are one of very few bloggers that forced me to leave a comment. Thanks for sharing your valuable ideas with all of us. I would love to know how did you created the "Custom Google Docs form" It looks so professional that rarely could someone recognize it to be a form created with google docs. A small tutorial on this would be really helpful.
More power to you! Best of luck with your work. :)
@MMA, I might put a tutorial together at some point when I have a chance. At the time I was a bit concerned it may be too advanced for the blogs target audience, people with little programming background. I still am as it's a considerably more difficult task than most items on this blog. You get into form HTML programming a bit to include form validation and I'd have to write out a custom javascript. Unfortunately, I do not have much time to work on projects for this blog currently as I'm involved in a number of other things.
No promises, but I'll think about it. Oh and thanks for the kind words!
James
Pretty cool! I would like to see a tutorial too if you find time. Also, when I click portfolio, it shows 'error getting posts'
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