KingWarin.de

Well, quite obvious I’m already writing a blog, so what’s this about?

Recently I decided that I want to give PHP another try – having last worked with PHP4 (and only taken a very small glance at PHP5) learning PHP7 might be worth giving a try. That’s not something new, in fact, I decided this more than half a year ago, but as always, if there is not a project it is hard (at least for me) to learn another language.
So what are my opportunities? What is it I can try to code? At best I’m able to use whatever is created once it is finished, but also if it’s not working out something that can be thrown away or at least be replaced by some already existing software.
The solution for this problem is easy, I’m writing a blog (actually a blog-system… and besides I can write a blog about writing a blog)!
Yes, there are several solutions for this on the web (like wordpress which I’m running right here). Yes, they’re well tested (or at least claim to be) and there are dozens of features and plugins available.
So why still writing a new blog?
Well, just for the sake of writing something and learning of a new language.

Of course there are some features I’m missing (at least in this wordpress-system) that I want to implement.

Reversed (or timely correct) order of posts
One could also call this „reading-mode“ or something similiar.
Reading a lot of travel-blogs I always get the creeps if I’m starting to read a new blog which is on it’s way for at least several months when I start reading. Why?
Because newest/latest entry is first!
If you (like me on those travel-blogs) want to get the whole experience of that blog you’ll have to go to the first (or more correct: last) page of that blog.
Now there are, as we all know, several types of „pagination“ which can be more or less pain when you want to reach the first entry ever:

• Standard pagination which displays several pages and a „First/Last Page“ Button
  -> easy mode, just click on last page and you’re good to go
• Older/Newer-entries pagination
  -> well, you have to do some scrolling and some clicking but sooner or later you’ll reach that last page
• Infinite Scrolling
  -> this is basically the screw-you-mode of pagination. Why? You almost never can jump several pages at once and you mostly can’t set a bookmark on the page you are currently reading. This is massive pain for me.

But assuming you finally reached the last page, now the earliest entry is at the bottom of that page, so you search for the beginning of the entry, which might be slightly above the end of the page, read that entry top-to-bottom and then scroll up to the next entry. And you’ll have to do that over and over again.
Doesn’t sound like a big problem at first, but think about a travel blog which is like two years on it’s way with one entry per week when you start reading. You’ll have to do all that scrolling hell like a 100 times.
By simply reversing the order of the pages and the entries for display there would be a coherent reading experience and you literally just go on and on reading, so that’s a feature I definitely want to have!

Another thing is multi-language support. Although it’s not widely used even if available (maybe because you have to write your posts for each language on you own)…
Still I do want this option as my intention is to write at least in German and English. Whether I’m ending up using the feature or not is something I’ll figure out later.
Regarding this feature, maybe there should be an „default language“ option, where posts will be displayed in given default language if not available in the currently selected language, maybe that idea is not that smart, but I’ll figure that out sometime in the future.

As a JavaScript-developer I tend to use Plugins and Libs which are wide-spread around the internet. Also I see that quite every page I visit is literally bloated by js and near to unusable if js is not available (ok, no js is a corner-case, but still there’s some interest for me), so one goal is to have as less js in the blog as possible.

Personally, like many many other people out there, I use several different devices to browse the internet. As screen sizes may vary (my desktop-system has one 22″ 16:10 and one 19″ 4:3 screen) the blog should not only be readable but also all pages and functions useable on quite every device.
You probably already got it, I’m talking about responsive design, which again is a feature I want and also one that’s on the „must-have“ list.

That’s it for now, this list doesn’t claim completeness or something similiar, it’s just a starting point and might get refined along the way.
Also there are many features that are not worth mentioning as they are standard functionalities.

So long
Sven