failing like never before

Way Back When

Way back in the days, almost a year ago, this site was running my custom CMS. It didn't look too bad, but it wasn't very configurable and lacked all the bells and whistles that make a mature blogging platform like WordPress so much cooler.

Here's a quick list of the functions that my custom application offered:

• Image gallery: Upload a picture that was less then 1mb in size and my application would save it and create a thumbnail, there was also a simple gallery interface
• Live search: A fairly simple feature to implement under Rails. For those of you that still haven't heard of web 2.0, "live search" is where the user types into a search box, and results are returned instantly, without having to actually hit enter and go to another page (try the live search in my left sidebar!)
• Anyone can join!: My application allowed anyone to keep a blog on my site. Your blog would be hosted at www.42gems.com/blog/<blog name>/, because I didn't know how to create subdomains automatically.
• Comments: A vistor to the site could add comments without having to register, and they could add cool little emoticons by using TinyMCE. The only problem was that I didn't use CAPTCHA, Akismet or any kind of comment moderation, so I had massive spam issues.
• Easy to use: One of the upsides of having very little features, my application was extremely easy to use. In that respect, it was vaguely like the ipod, except the ipod isn't free.

And thats about it in terms of feature sets, for my old blog application. I believe pictures are in order...

But before I moved to WordPress, I was using Typo. See here for reasons why I decided to move to WordPress. And just because I feel like it, here's a really low quality screenshot of my old Typo blog, using the iWTAP theme.