The Kyle File

Out of the box, Chyrp Lite gave me just about everything I needed to rebuild my blog from the broken pieces of WordPress, but it gave me something else as well: functionality similar to Tumblr, which I find that I like very much. It even includes two themes that are described as "tumbleblog" themes. I especially like the theme called Umbra, as I have always liked dark themes, though I may still change some of the background colors. For example, I may want to modify it so that the background is blue like my main website and the template that I wrote for making basic websites. Still, the default theme called Blossom and the similar Topaz theme had some elements I found missing from Umbra and Sparrow, which are the "tumblelog" themes. I really like how the tumblelog themes have the navigation bar across the top, but I find that they don't show my pages. Not to worry though, it is very easy to modify them.

One thing to note is that the first time I tried to modify a theme by adding my site description as a subheading at the top of the page, the modification didn't appear. I even logged into the server and tried restarting my web services to no avail. I found out though that the reason my modifications were not appearing was due to the fact that my theme layouts were cached. Once I removed the cache folders, my modifications appeared correctly, and the caches never came back. From that point, the elements I wanted in Umbra that are in Blossom were very easy to add. All I needed to do was to first copy Umbra's main folder to a folder of a different name, edit the info.php file to differentiate it from Umbra in my list of themes, then copy the parts of the sidebar that I wanted from Blossom and paste them into my modified Umbra. Now my pages and categories show up on all pages and posts, just as they did in Blossom and Topaz, except across the top instead of going down the side, and my related posts show up underneath the categories on post pages. I decided not to copy the recent posts, since the index page is already showing the five most recent posts, so I don't feel like I need to show the links across the top to posts that are already linked on their titles. Related posts looks useful on individual post pages though, so I kept that feature.

My theming modifications are not complete by any stretch, but this is much easier even than what I did back in the day with Tumblr, and the software is still in active development. I mean I've visited the git repository more than 5 times over the past couple of weeks, and every time I look at the latest commit, it is never more than two days old. As I write this post, the latest commit is 18 hours old. So I'm confident that my new favorite blogging software will continue to be developed and maintained for a good long time. I also have my choice of database back ends, easy theme customization, post types similar to Tumblr, exactly the extensions I need that are all tested and known to work, very little I don't find useful, Markdown posts and pages, categories and free-form tags, screen reader accessibility right out of the box, a nice comment system included, complete with a moderation queue, locally generated text-based math captchas to prevent spam instead of the dreaded image verifications or third-party services, just about everything I could want in a lightweight and compact package. To sum it all up very nicely, I ❤️ Chyrp Lite 🐦

As part of the switch to a self-hosted blog, I decided to minimize the number of third-party services I depend on to make everything work. So after a good deal of fiddling, I have been able to cut the cord that was tying me to Feedburner. WordPress has built-in RSS feeds, both for posts and for comments, and I don’t have any problems with either of them. Even better, I was able to install a plugin that allows readers to subscribe to e-mail updates from a very easy-to-use form that I put right in the sidebar. No more clicking on a link that takes you to an entirely different website to subscribe to e-mail updates. It’s also better to have that subscribe/unsubscribe form in a visible location on every page instead of just having a little link that says "Get the email sitting up near the top of the page next to the archive. Maybe now I'll get some e-mail subscribers 😀 . Either way, I really like this whole layout better than anything I had with third-party services. I only hope my readers enjoy it as much as I do.

This is mainly just a test, but if I did it right, my posts on my old TumbleLog should look nearly identical to the posts on The Kyle File. I notice that even the subscription links for the feed and e-mail subscriptions on Tumblr still work as expected, because I haven’t yet decided to replace Feedburner with my self-hosted feed. I may test that shortly to see whether or not e-mail subscriptions will still work using the form on the main page if I switch to the standard follow button plugin. The only problem I may have with that is that my e-mails may not go out at the same time, or may be formatted differently, but that isn’t really a big issue at this point.

I replaced my link to a page containing Feedburner's email subscription form with the direct link. It doesn’t conform to my theme, but since the form opened Feedburner's window to present the captcha verification, I thought it would be better to have the email address textbox in the same place. It just looks a bit cleaner and allows for one less click and page load during the subscription process.

It's the last piece of the puzzle, and the single thing I missed from Posterous. Readers of The Kyle File can now subscribe via email to my feed, thanks to Google’s Feedburner. I have placed the link immediately below the Get the feed link at the bottom of my left sidebar. If I did this right, anyone who subscribes to my emails will receive a single message once every day that I post. It looks like you can also click Get the feed and you'll see a link to have The Kyle File delivered to your email along with several other options for receiving the feed. If you have any problems or suggestions regarding this feature, let me know in the comments section below.