ode - a simple personal publishing platform for the web

Editing themes can be a pain. Ideally, you want to see the new site design with your content, exactly as it will look and behave, live on the web. Also, if you're like me, you'd like to be able to play around with the new design when it's convenient, and cut over immediately, without any downtime, or risk of giving the appearance that the site of broken.

Typically, there are any number of problems that go along with trying to accomplish all of these things, including (aong others):

• Small changes can have big (sometimes unintended) consequences

• Maintaining a separate mock site can be bothersome and logistically difficult, especially when it comes to keeping content in sync between two versions of a site design.

• Setting up something like this while modifying the theme is a distraction, and is hard to justify for small changes.

• Eventually carrying over changes made offline or in parallel can involve it's own set of challenges.

Ode's simple design provides two way to accomplish this seamlessly. Both are variations on the same theme (ahem no pun intended).

1. Create a copy of the theme you want to modify with a new (temporary) name.
2. Take advantage of Ode's dated theme mechanism.

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This will be short and to the point. This is in response to a user request. Given that a native commenting addin is not yet available, I do want to make sure that there is some sort of commenting solution for the time being.

Note: This is based on a very early pre-release of the disqus addin for Ode.

Download the disqus addin

Introduction

Disqus is a popular 3rd party commenting system with a lot of bells and whistles. To learn more, you'll want to visit their site. In fact you must visit the site and set up an account.

Disqus has a lot of features including (among others):

• Notifications,
• Media embedding,
• Integration with Facebook, Twitter, and other social sites

One of the big advantages of using Disqus is that it allows you to require that users authenticate to comment, without requiring that you manage authentications, or ask users to set up an account on your site.

Visitors can authenticate through Disqus using: a Disqus account, Twitter, Yahoo, and OpenId.

(There's also an option to allow visitors to post as guests using only a name and an email address.)

Should you use Disqus for comments?

At the moment a 3rd party commenting service is your only option with Ode. So if you want to enable comments right now, it's either Disqus or something else like it. What if the native comment solution were available and it did everything you need, should you use Disqus then?

I'd say it depends on how you think of comments.

If you consider comments an integral part of your site then you might prefer to have native comments saved locally along with the rest of your site content.

On the other hand, if you consider comments a nice extra, but not necessarily part of the content of your site, then a hosted service might be better for you.

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Most of this is either fairly self-explanatory or covered by the documentation at simpleviewer.net. There really is nothing specific to Ode about using SimpleViewer. (That's the point after all :) Still if you're looking for a detailed step-by-step walk through along with a couple of suggestions, you might want to read this through.

Regardless, give SimpleViewer a try. I think you'll like it.

You might prefer to read this relatively long post using the text_page theme.

I've decided to tackle photo galleries for this first how-to for several reasons:

1. Photos are important and speak directly to the idea of 'the personal web' I like to think about. Integrating photos with a weblog is a unique and compelling way to share experiences. Photos on their own are a little abstract and captions don't help enough. Tags, though informative are about as pleasant to read as an entry in a library catalog (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_catalog). A weblog post gives context to the photos while the photos enliven the text. It's a perfect marriage. I'd love to see more Ode sites featuring lots and lots of photos.

2. It's pretty straight-forward and the results are really nice. Though people post lots of photos to social media sites, this is an area where I believe weblogs have the advantage.

3. There's a particular solution I really like and want to talk about.

Let's get started.

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The goal of these how-tos is two fold:

1. To serve as a very practical resource to help you accomplish the sorts of things you might want to do with your Ode site, integrating a photo gallery for example.

2. To serve as a reminder of advantages of the Open Web. The fact that these solutions work for Ode with no direct coordination or collaboration (as they work with many other platforms) is a testament to the true value of Open. It is because of open that I can claim quite sincerely that a humble little application like Ode is in a lot of ways on par with Facebook and other platforms which enjoy hundreds of millions of dollars worth of investment and legions of full and part-time developers.

Hopefully there will be a bunch.

Want to write a howto yourself? I'd encourage you to do it. If you'd like my input, feel free to email me directly (or you can discuss it on the forum.