Yesterday (in-between job hunting) I updated the psychedharma.com website with an "elib-blog" integration that seemed to go pretty smoothly. The software depends on "elib-base" and Empathy and these are the same three main components that this site also depends on (as well as the templating library Smarty). The three components can now all be installed using Composer however elib-blog is not currently a stable enough project to be public. I have also been working towards a new release of Empathy (version 0.9.6) which will include updated documentation. All information regarding this micro-framework is gradually starting to be stockpiled over at empathyphp.co.uk. (Notice the attempt at making the project look as official as possible.) Be warned that finalising the next release is still in progress and the same is true for the accompanying docs.

Attempting to see things as objectively as possible, I'm pretty pleased that setting up a new blog using this stack of easily installable components went so well and I can't help but wonder how long it would have taken me to put together something similar using Wordpress and be as happy with the overall result - even though I admit that what I was looking for was ultimately quite minimal in terms of features. The main things I cared about implementing were multiple categories, a blog archive widget, responsive layout (that still needs some improvement), SEO friendly URLs, RSS feed, site SEO settings, caching mechanism and of course a simple secured admin area for managing blog posts themselves. Eventually I began to start to feel freed up to start planning some really killer features (jokes) like a cartoon cat that will pop up and say random things to site visitors. I guess that's a sign that things went pretty a-ok in the end.