25 Days of omg.lol

Day 3

By now you might have poked around your weblog, either like that one meme (the “come on, do something” stick guy), or maybe you’ve done some intense template customization (yeah, you know who you are).

Well, today brings an entirely new way to poke at your weblog, using the new Configuration feature. You’ll see a brand new button in the Tools section where you can access it.

At first, it might look fairly underwhelming:

// Weblog Configuration

Weblog Title: A Weblog
Author: Your beautiful name here

But don’t be fooled: you’re looking at one of the most powerful configuration screens you’ve ever seen. Well, maybe. Top 10, at least. Anyway: there’s only a tiny amount of stuff there now, but there will be more to come. For now, let’s take a look at what’s going on here:

  1. The first line is a comment. For now you can comment with //, but you’ll be able to use other kinds of comments soon (I ran out of time tonight to add all of the cool comment types that I want to add).
  2. After that, there are two configuration options: Weblog title and Author.
  3. You can change these values to whatever you’d like. Give it a try!

If one of the configuration items looks familiar, then you have a good eye! If you’ve poked around in your template, you may have noticed that there’s a {weblog-title} tag (and that it currently defaults to the extremely underwhelming A Weblog value). So, yeah, you can change that now! The Weblog title value will appear wherever you have {weblog-title} in your template. Give it a try!

You might wonder how we get from Weblog title to {weblog-title}. Without going into too much boring detail, just know that your configuration items are case-insensitive, and spaces are turned into dashes. So feel free to use whatever you prefer, and know that the tag matching will happen. (Or at least it should—we’re still in a pre-pre-alpha here.)

Soon, there will be more interesting and useful configuration options (stay tuned). But for now, the key takeaway is that the weblog.lol configuration system is simple, flexible, and fairly powerful. It’ll combine ad-hoc key-value pairs (as shown above) and other functional/behavioral configuration items within the same file. And the file-based format will make it easy for you to backup or share your configuration, as well as to copy and paste interesting chunks of configuration that you might discover elsewhere.

Other updates

Stay tuned for more tomorrow! 👋

— Adam