Bloomingstars.com undergoes major overhaul
New features and new content
Bloomingstars.com was launched back in early 2005 as my small place on the boundless Internet to share my experience about astronomy and computing-related stuff. It consisted of a static part with many articles, reviews and an astronomical photo album, managed by a small homebrewn web application; a scrolling menu enabled the user to navigate the site.
However, the home page, used mainly for a small presentation of the website and for posting the news/updates, was quite unconfortable to maintain, because the one-line updates are contained in a configuration file which has to be edited and uploaded to the site. So that's why I came up with the idea of using a blog application, in order to write more elaborate updates and small articles much more easily. Furthermore, a blog application allows for a higher interactivity with the visitors by providing a feedback/comment mechanism.
I dug the 'Net for a while, and then I came across Pebble, Java-based blogging application which looks quite straightforward to use, also because a RDBMS engine is not needed.
The rest of the old website is still there: the web application (which is quite handy in some respects), the static part with all the articles and the scrolling menu which is also available in the blog pages.
At present, the photo gallery is managed by JAlbum, which is a great program but requires an off-line management of the gallery content: that is, I generate it on my home PC and then upload it onto the website server. If time allows, the next step will be to install an online photo gallery engine.
Last but not least, many thanks to my good friend Fabrizio Giudici for hosting my home page.
However, the home page, used mainly for a small presentation of the website and for posting the news/updates, was quite unconfortable to maintain, because the one-line updates are contained in a configuration file which has to be edited and uploaded to the site. So that's why I came up with the idea of using a blog application, in order to write more elaborate updates and small articles much more easily. Furthermore, a blog application allows for a higher interactivity with the visitors by providing a feedback/comment mechanism.
I dug the 'Net for a while, and then I came across Pebble, Java-based blogging application which looks quite straightforward to use, also because a RDBMS engine is not needed.
The rest of the old website is still there: the web application (which is quite handy in some respects), the static part with all the articles and the scrolling menu which is also available in the blog pages.
At present, the photo gallery is managed by JAlbum, which is a great program but requires an off-line management of the gallery content: that is, I generate it on my home PC and then upload it onto the website server. If time allows, the next step will be to install an online photo gallery engine.
Last but not least, many thanks to my good friend Fabrizio Giudici for hosting my home page.