Blog

 Just about every PHP programmer has heard of or used Smarty Templates.

I had heard of it a long time ago, but only just recently started using it. For the longest time, I have been using good old phpLib's Template.inc. It is simple and suits most of my needs. But it's quite old. I've been using it for like 7 years.

A colleague of mine convinced me to try out Smarty. I used it to create a new RSS feature for PaperDemon.com's blogs (and also added an RSS feed for my blog on BogusRed.net as well, subscribe to me!). I did it using Smarty because it seamed like a good thing to templatize and also because Smarty has a really good caching system. So if people's RSS readers are constantly pinging the RSS feed pages, the PHP won't have to pull from the database every time. +1 for performance!

I've been wanting to redo my keyword system on PaperDemon for a while. There were a couple things I wanted to change about it. One was to change it from storing the text of each keyword everytime it's used. The other, is I wanted to change it to a tag cloud where it makes the common words larger and less common words smaller. I love this type of visualization of data.

So I decided today was going to be the day that I build my tag cloud class. And it only took me a day's work to finish it! So far I have only integrated it into the Blogs system. This is because PaperDemon's blog system did not have a keyword/tag system yet so it was easy to plop one in. You can see the start of our very own blogging tag cloud here:

http://www.paperdemon.com/blogs/

I will migrate artwork and comics to it eventually. However, I'd have to first migrate any existing data into the tag cloud which is not going to be an easy feat. Especially considering artwork has +75,000 keyword entries.