/blog

I'm dreaming of a white Christmas, and the weather forecast is hinting at the possibility...

I'm testing a new idea that might make me use the Garden more: allow Garden pages to be posted straight to the blog. This is being typed in the Garden but, using a different submit button, I can change the form action to submit it to the blog.

And it worked!

While I can create and edit drafts directly on the blog, it may be that I want to research, write and edit something in the Garden – I have a "Post Ideas" parent page under which I create children for listing topics and making notes. Rather than copy/pasting from there to the blog I thought it would be a nice idea to be able to post directly from a Garden page.

Using the formaction attribute on a separate button, to override the default behaviour, I can submit the form to the blog rather than the garden:

<input formaction="../" type="submit" value="Post">

The Garden posting form has been tweaked to match the fields required by the blog (including hidden fields) and the blog page performs an additional check to remove the first line of content if it is the parent page indicator.

$parent_pos = strpos($content, "Parent:");
if ($parent_pos === 0) {
  $content = substr($content, strpos($content, "\r\n") + 1);
}

To avoid accidental double posts, the blog checks that a session variable matches one set by the form. This has also been incorporated on the Garden so that the required values are set when sending a page to the blog.

Liked: Manton Reece...

"I've had to do some work in WordPress recently, and I've gotta say I think Micro.blog stands up pretty well ... in terms of fast, simple UI, very happy with what we've got."

I feel exactly the same way about (b)log-In – fast and simple has been my goal since before I even thought of building my own CMS. WordPress is too bloated and complex for a simple blog.