blogplates redo
Blogplates has a new twist on the old design. The same design is being used, just with a bunch of optimization, mainly by use of CSS that I didn’t know how to do back in 2001 when I made the site!! 
According to WebSiteOptimization.com, I went from 96313 bytes to 22438 bytes. So I’m pretty proud of the changes.
We are open for new members - do you have any suggestions for designers who make templates that should be part of the list? Thanks for any ideas, or feel free to point them to the site to check us out.
A bit of fun history:
Back in May of 2001, I put together a new project for love-productions. This world of weblogs was getting to be popular, and more designer friends were starting to make designs especially thought out for their weblogs and for others to use. A webring seemed like a great way to show off the options to blog owners looking for a design.
Blogplates has now grown a ton in the almost 3 years its been running. In December of 2001, it got its own domain at blogplates.net. The number of members has gone up throughout the years. The number of spammy additions to the ring have also gone up (over 500 submissions overall, with less than 75 being legitimate in the 3 years).
And ringsurf has gotten harder and harder to use. After testing 3 or 4 different self-hosted webring programs, I finally settled on Ringlink. I couldn’t find a good php/mysql script, which would have been nice, and I didn’t have the time to modify one of the sucky ones to fit my needs. So I went with this perl script, which is actually pretty nice because its highly configurable. If I was more adapt at perl coding, I’d modify it to store an extra value for the designers journal URL. Now that I have Rinklink set up, I’ll probably put wedblog and the Anniversary pages ring up on the same installation. Who knows, maybe I’ll open it up to other rings in the future.
Oh, and I started blogplates so long ago that I had Greymatter set up for updates. My host has since banned GM, so I was leary of making any updates. So I have Movable Type set up now, and imported all the old entries. I’m using it for a guestbook-type post for a basic forum, and started a FAQ section (Q: What is the difference between general templates and weblog templates? Answer).
All of these things come together to make the site even richer in knowledge than before, and I’m proud of that.
Comments
You do such wonderful work!
Posted by: Lisa | March 17, 2004 05:29 AM
It looks good, nice and sleek. It’s kind of funny looking back how things have changed. I tried different PHP webring scripts and Ringlink was the best by far. Hopefully it works for you.
Posted by: Carla | March 17, 2004 09:30 AM
Hey, honey—the link to the optimization site is spelled wrong so clicking on it doesn’t get you there... I think you’re missing an i and the a is in the wrong place... I think...
Posted by: Zuly | March 18, 2004 07:15 PM