I spent all of last month scraping Edward Lifegem’s Blogger site from the API. That’s great and all, but what is the point if no one can access the content? My goal for July was to pull content from a database and make it look and behave as closely to the original site as possible. I think I did a decent job during this month but the current rehosted site is still missing a few key features. Instead of one big task like many of the previous goals, this one is comprised of a lot of smaller tasks:
- Importing the formatting and CSS from the Wayback Machine
- Pulling and displaying content from database
- Converting links to query strings
- Dynamically creating Newer/Older post links
- Filling the yearly/monthly post listings on the sidebar
- Displaying user comments
- Implementing searchbar functionality
I was able to finish most of the tasks above within my original deadline of July but a few have proven to require more effort. I will try to update this post with the new tasks I accomplish in the months to come.
One final note: I kinda fibbed a little bit on the post publishing dates. My original plan was to publish one post for all of the entries above as my documentation for July. I had probably 75% of it done within the first few days of August but then realized that I was really leaving out a lot of content because the post was getting fairly long. After some consideration I split them into separate posts and added significantly more detail. I have assigned them dates one week apart and in the order I accomplished them, but don’t try to derive any more meaning than that from the published date/times.