Tech blogs

AnonymousPrime

Hi everyone. I have a tech blog looking at some .Net stuff I have worked on, hosted on wordpress.com.
And-it-is-a-pain-in-the-&rse.

Can anyone recommend a better free blogging site for posting code and uploading solutions?

John_Mc

AnonymousPrime wrote: »

Hi everyone. I have a tech blog looking at some .Net stuff I have worked on, hosted on wordpress.com.
And-it-is-a-pain-in-the-&rse.

Can anyone recommend a better free blogging site for posting code and uploading solutions?

Maybe make your own? That's what I did

Share the link if you can, would be interested as I work with .Net as well.

Neodymium

What about a cms like joomla or drupal, they're fairly similar to wordpress but easier to use in my opinion than wordpress.

Trojan

AnonymousPrime wrote: »

Hi everyone. I have a tech blog looking at some .Net stuff I have worked on, hosted on wordpress.com.
And-it-is-a-pain-in-the-&rse.

Can anyone recommend a better free blogging site for posting code and uploading solutions?

Depends on exactly what difficulties you had with WordPress.com - if you tell us what it is you didn't like we can give a more specific answer. For me, I'd recommend WordPress.org, self hosted - most of the benefits of WordPress.com, none of the drawbacks.

It won't be free, but you can get hosting from a fiver a month, and if you're a student you can get free hosting from several companies.

Neodymium wrote: »

What about a cms like joomla or drupal, they're fairly similar to wordpress but easier to use in my opinion than wordpress.

Interesting - that runs the exact opposite to the majority opinion online. What in particular made WP harder, or the others easier, in your experience?

AnonymousPrime

What i liked about wordpress was it's absolute simplicity. I am not interested in spending hours styling things before I can get one post up, I just want to get right into the blogging element.

The drawback with wordpress is its absolute simplicity . So far my major issues are:

1. not being able to upload .zip files for visual studio solutions: video/music/pics only.
2. No real control over the Html that is rendered, which generally cuts my source code examples to shreds, even with the [sourcecode] markup.

That is what I have encountered so far but I am not naive enough to think this is the end of my woes.

@John_Mc to be honest I would like to keep a level of anonymity on boards ,as the name suggests , and my blog has my name plastered all over it.

Sparks

There are some source code plugins that are helpful with wordpress. I use CodeColourer myself - here's an example of it in use.

Webmonkey

John_Mc wrote: »

Maybe make your own? That's what I did

Share the link if you can, would be interested as I work with .Net as well.

Nice site but the time it takes to download the backgrounds on your site is crazy! Took 5 - 10 seconds to load! It's nearly a meg!

AnonymousPrime

Sparks wrote: »

There are some source code plugins that are helpful with wordpress. I use CodeColourer myself - here's an example of it in use.

The built in [sourcecode] markup is pretty good, but just inserting a < or < in the blog has some pretty unpredictable results. Sometimes it takes it as a tag, sometimes as text, sometimes it puts in unexpected newlines. And sometimes, each time you his the save button you get a different result.

Tbh I think this is at the core of wordpress, before any plugins are applied

John_Mc

Webmonkey wrote: »

Nice site but the time it takes to download the backgrounds on your site is crazy! Took 5 - 10 seconds to load! It's nearly a meg!

Thanks for the feedback and you're absolutely right! I put it up on the website reviews forum and mentioned the BG size which is 800kb. I can't get it any lower because of the amount of noise in it so I'm going to have to come up with something else

Placebo

John_Mc wrote: »

Thanks for the feedback and you're absolutely right! I put it up on the website reviews forum and mentioned the BG size which is 800kb. I can't get it any lower because of the amount of noise in it so I'm going to have to come up with something else

1-you reduce the colors in the palette when saving as GIF and make it half the size /400kb, as theres not that many tones in it


2-you can stretch the image
think i did it here [http://evo.streetfighter.ie/]

3-alternatively, you can have the image without the noise, [even make sure it repeats so you can just have a small repeated image]
then have the noise on a transparent png, and repeat it above the background. Longer method, will need to use extra div's in the background but smaller in size for sure

John_Mc

Placebo wrote: »

1-you reduce the colors in the palette when saving as GIF and make it half the size /400kb, as theres not that many tones in it


2-you can stretch the image
think i did it here [http://evo.streetfighter.ie/]

3-alternatively, you can have the image without the noise, [even make sure it repeats so you can just have a small repeated image]
then have the noise on a transparent png, and repeat it above the background. Longer method, will need to use extra div's in the background but smaller in size for sure

All good suggestions and I'll definitely give them a go. Thanks!

AnonymousPrime

Placebo wrote: »

2-you can stretch the image
think i did it here [http://evo.streetfighter.ie/]

Thats a really good looking site. Colour scheme is excellent. Scrolling anchors were a nice touch too.

John_Mc

AnonymousPrime wrote: »

Thats a really good looking site. Colour scheme is excellent. Scrolling anchors were a nice touch too.

+1

Placebo

cheers guys, thought i try something quirky as it was for a small event.