Bloggart: what's coming
Dear Bloggart belovers (like there were any out there…), this is a quick update on what’s happening with my Bloggart fork. Yes, fork - this is now the correct way to calling it.
Initially I was just touching and modelling the software to my personal needs. Now I’m really going in my own direction.
Anyway, let’s stay focused. I was here to tell you about a couple of new things that are coming to Bloggart.
Pages
If there is one thing that I really don’t like of Bloggart, is the total absence of pages as a type of content. Pages that can be used to serve content like:
- a description of yourself
- a “homepage” for a project
- an “about me” page
- a “curriculum vitae” or “resume” page
- even a hierarchy of pages(!)
and alike.
Yes, structurally we are talking of something very similar to a post - but a post has things like “comments”, “tags”, “links to previous/next” posts and so forth. Maybe I’m too picky (or too old school) (or too wordpressy). But that’s what I like.
So, I’m adding support for Page content. It’s a bit tricky, because Bloggart was designed with Posts in mind, but it’s happening.
A better sitemap.xml
Sitemaps are currently the best way of making your website easy to crawl for search engine, ensuring always a good positioning in search result (given that your content is relevant ;-) ).
The current version of Bloggart generates a very basic sitemap.xml (you can see mine here). Just the links without any other metadata:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
<loc>http://blog.ivandemarino.me/</loc>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://blog.ivandemarino.me/2004/11/15/il-mio-nuovo-blogger-my-new-blogger/</loc>
</url>
<!-- ... -->
</urlset>
A bit too simple if you ask me. There are other informations that should be there, like <lastmod> and <priority>.
As you know (you do? of course you do! you love Bloggart, otherwise you’d not be reading this :-P), Bloggart serves static content, that has been previously generated and stored in the App Engine Datastore (and Memcache).
Problem is, currently the content gets “statically stored” without any type information. And I need that type (in addition to other metadata) to generate a better sitemap.
So, that’s what I’m adding.
Want to see what’s going on?
If you are interested in following what’s happening to Bloggart, follow it on github or just take a look to the latest commits on the “master” branch.
If you like bloggart or just use it, please let me know with comments or message me on github.