I really like the Sparkfun site’s format what with each new post having a little picture and old posts being expandable by clicking the little arrow. I’d like to set up a blog like that but I’m much more hardware-oriented than web design-oriented. I feel like Sparkfun wouldn’t mind helping people out by sharing code (unless the site was designed by a third party).
Anybody have any information on this?
PS: I hope I’m posting in the right place. Most everybody else is talking about products, but it is the “SparkFun Site Questions/Comments” section after all …
Hey gregory - just saw this. Would have answered sooner, but I don’t spend a whole lot of time keeping up with the forums.
In principle, we’re very much in favor of sharing source code, and we’d love to publish a lot of what drives the site. Unfortunately, we’re a long ways from having things in order to go public with the whole shebang, and it’d be a lot of work to separate our news post stuff into a standalone package. Even then, it still wouldn’t make a very good general-purpose blog engine.
You’re certainly welcome to check out source for how we do the little toggle arrows:
https://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/js/sparkfun.js
There’s a ton of stuff in there, but look for a function called toggleDiv(), then view source for a page where it’s used, the idea is pretty straightforward.
Likewise, if you want to borrow any CSS technique, the stylesheet’s here:
http://static.sparkfun.com/sparkfun.css
Disclaimer: I’m entirely responsible for much of this code, but I make no claims about its quality or suitability for any particular purpose. When I get the free cycles, I’ll make sure that we have it explicitly published with appropriate licenses. Might be a while.
As far as blog software goes, well, there’s plenty of decent free software out there. What’re your needs?