BTooLs.eu is open for business

Stardate 100.2010 Captain's Log

My brand new website / blog is finally open. Read more about it and leave your feedback.

Supplemental

After years of delays and laziness I finally decided to make my own website too.

How ?

I always got caught on different projects, and when I was free i didn`t want to ruin my holiday .. anyway I cropped out an Expression Engine (recommended by Alex Buga) and started working.

First I was like .. ah another "blog just install with some plugins" script, but after a couple of days of testing and reading tutorials (ya my first time when I had to actual read the manual) I was like "damn, a powerful CMS was hiding in there". The theme was original based on a free template by vayaDesign, but seriously modified. I first started with a "notebook" style, but I`ve found that free template and transformed it to a more "star-trek" sci-fi template skin.

I wanted to combine a personal brand ( my projects under the BTooLs category), and a mini personal blog, in the same website, but separately, and I tell ya EE is exactly I was looking for.

Interactive

After I discovered EE's power I began to play with different plugins and modules (that came with the install) and I realized that I can make this website more then I hoped for.

For example, the right sidebar is usual for blogroll, tag clouds and categories. Here is more than that, with a simple RSS parser i made her more interactive, for example : in SciFi category will display the latest news of my favorite franchise, Stargate that is, in Personal section my last tweets and so on. The interactive sensation is completed by a changing background and latest entries from that specific section and more to come...

More on Expression Engine

I had to write something about EE. It is my first experience with it, and is a good one with a very good result (i think).

EE has them all : plugins, modules and extensions. Good support community, free and paid version, the usual settings and so on. But only 2 things separate EE from the other scripts :

The template system

EE has a powerful template system, just a list with it's features : static content, global variables, cache, PHP or direct SQL queries, sub-templates, versioning.

Weblogs

If you want just a simple blog don't count this feature. You can make more blogs/sites with one install. Each blog have their own : template, categories, custom fields, users with access and more. The best example is my blog and BTooLs site. For now they share the same template but in the future the differences between them will be more obvious.

In one word, it has POWER. The bad side of this power is that is harder to handle, you need some experience to get the best from EE, but with some extra work and patience your dream blog (website) will become reality. You can read more about Expression Engine on EE Features . And more is to come, the 2.0 version will be more powerful. I'll try to write some beginners tutorials about how to customize your Expression Engine Install too.

Feed me with comments

Anyway this is the almost-final version, please post comments with feedback, bad or wrong, bugs or whatever .. I need them to survive Thanks.

Tags : blog, website, btools, b3at, beat, cool

Entry Info

By .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) • Tagged #Gaming #SciFi #Software #Web #Personal • Written April 11 2010 • So far it has 1573 views and 3 Comments • Permalink •

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