So the old dreamguts site was put up in a bit of a hurry and pretty quickly i realised that not only did it look bad but there were some pretty bad choices in terms of data organisation and usebility.

My re-design has attempted to get a bit more of a tumblog feel to the site. All the products i post are part of the rss feed, so when a user subscribes to the feed the yget blog posts and new products and art work when i post them. This means that i dont have to re-blog about the new stuff i put up. So here are the things I have implemented and why I think the are cool.

Blogas mentioned above all pieces of content i post are sucked through by the RSS feed, I implemented this using the blog for umbraco and then modifiying the rss output macro. Because my products have a seperate image field (rather than a image embedded in rich text) I had to add the following to the rss output in order to pull through the image

  1. <image>
  2. <url><xsl:value-of select="$SiteURL"/></url>
  3. <title><xsl:value-of select="@nodeName"/></title>
  4. <link><xsl:value-of select="$SiteURL"/></link>
  5. <width><xsl:value-of select="umbraco.library:GetMedia(./data[@alias='product_media'], 'false')/data [@alias = 'umbracoWidth']"/></width>
  6. <height><xsl:value-of select="umbraco.library:GetMedia(./data[@alias='product_media'], 'false')/data [@alias = 'umbracoHeight']"/></height>
  7. <description>This is my cool image for my feed</description>
  8. </image>

 

I also added a facebook comments box to replace the normal comments box that blog 4 umbraco uses. Facebook have a really useful developers page which lists all the cool widgets you can embed and even gives you rough estimates for how long it will take. I think one of the downsides i can see with this implementation is that it wont be possible for me to set up umbraco notifications on new comments made but I think that is a small price to pay.

In my next post I will talk about my implementation of simpleCart.js and awesome discoveries in safari debugging.

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