Today I finally feel reasonably comfortable with the backend work done on the site. I’ve swept the last spec of dust under the rug so to speak. I’m now ready to start writing. But before I dive into Swift, I want to take the opportunity to make a few notes of what have been going on in the backend.
I have look around and have consider a few choice and I went with WordPress for the blog. It’s a pretty robust CMS suit that focuses on blogging and have a very mature plugin and theme ecosystem. Resource can be easily found on the internet to do almost anything. With power and flexibility, it always comes with a cost and that usually mean the site may not keep up if there was an explosion of visitors (Of course there are ways to have a cache system in front of WordPress but I’ll cross that bridge when I get there). I did consider using a lighter engine like Pico (the CMS, not the text editor), however, they all feel like I have to put in a lot of work to even get started. If I had chose Pico, I would not have a beautiful Swift aware Syntax Highlighter working in such a short time.
Speaking of Syntax Highlighter, I came across Crayon Syntax Highlighter plugin. It would be really silly to ask the plugin author for a Swift parser when Swift is just 2 weeks old. So I took it upon myself to put in the language definition and color scheme that look like Apple’s own color scheme. The color scheme should make the Swift code on this site very familiar to those who read Apple’s documentation. Here is how it looks:
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/* Some life... * number of sorts */ var lifeMeaning = 42 lifeMeaning = 50 // And finally let addressee = "World" println("Hello \(addressee)!") |
And that concludes my short note about the site. If you are eager to see real Swift content, the next post will be it. It’ll be published shortly (No, really. It’s being proof-read now…).
—Swiftloc signing off.