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What's in a Super Simple Post

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As I shared yesterday, I wanted to create something that would allow me to post very short posts to my personal blog, but many more options that twitter. Twitter is great, but for this instance it just wouldn't fit the bill.

So I embarked on yet another journey down the path of creating something that I think will change the way I interact with my website ( I do this fairly often). Once I committed my thoughts to making this change, I had to think what a post really consisted of.

After thinking about this deeply I came up with the following attributes that make up a post. At least this is what a post means to me, and keep in mind this is only a text post, not a video post, picture post, quote post or anything else. This is what I consider a "Wordpress" style of post which I often use on this blog or any other.

• A Title = In what system does this not exist?
• Post Body = This is where the magic happens. To me it's just a large text box that allows me to put anything into it. Images can be linked, words can be bolded, underline, etc.. There should also be the ability to have a "teaser" and full body. The ability to have a "Read More" button.
• Status - This is where I determine when it will be published. Either it's live now or its a draft or it's live on a certain date and time.
• Tags - Who doesn't need these in todays world. I've come to realize I use tagging much more than I do categorization. Categorizing things via keywords like tags, gives me more options than single categories.
• URL - I like the publishing industry style of keyword slugs. And I'll stick with that, but this shouldn't be an all or nothing field. But one thing is for sure, it should be unique.
• Comment toggle = I like the ability to turn comments on and off for a certain post. There have been times when I really don't want any more comments on a particular post, so being able to adjust that threshold is an important aspect to me.

So that pretty much does it. At least that's a good go for the first pass. I'm sure as I research this a little more and start to use it, that I will come up with some changes and find out that I actually prefer to work in a slightly different way. But right now I think this is enough to get me started. Remember after this is up and running in the default Django admin, I want to skin it so I can have a completely different user interface.

More on the rest tomorrow.

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