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Re-frameworking

As you have no doubt seen if you’ve visited my site , my site recently underwent a bit of a cosmetic overhaul (i.e. it stopped looking like shite). That out of the way, I’m now contemplating the prospects of another redesign. This one isn’t with the front-end of the blog – I’m happy with that for the time being – but with the software powering it.

As some of you will no doubt know from my incessant whining occasional criticism, I have certain issues with WordPress and the language (PHP) on which it’s built. I won’t go into them here for fear of this turning into another rant, but suffice it to say that I’m not entirely happy with my current choice of CMS.

As far as I can see, I have three choices:

  1. Stick with WordPress: it works well enough and my time might be better spent working on other projects.
  2. Switch to another CMS with a sharper focus on web standards, semantic HTML and clean design. Only problem here is that I don’t know what’s good: I’ve been immersed in the world of WordPress for too long.
  3. Roll my own. This is looking increasingly appealing, especially as it gives me the perfect excuse to play around with a clean language (Python or Ruby, most probably) with a clean framework on top (such as Django or Rails). Problem here is that it would be a pretty mammoth task, even with the help of one of the aforementioned frameworks, especially if I want to keep all the features WordPress offers.

So, thoughts? Which route do you reckon I should take?

Redesign

As you may have noticed, I would seem to have made the deadline and got my new site up and running with a minimum of trouble, although when WordPress runs in UTF-8 and most MySQL tools default to Latin-1, you’re entering a world of pain. It also doesn’t help when the timezone support in PHP (which is highly dodgy) and the timezone support in WordPress (which is even worse) conspire against you.

That said, there will beare some bugs in the site (in fact, I found and fixed one while writing this post). The known issues are as follows:

If you find a problem with the site which isn’t one of these, or if you just want to comment on the new design, please do let me know in the comments or via e-mail. Constructive criticism is very much welcomed, in fact even more so than comments along the lines of “Seriously matey, that rocks” (no points for identifying the source of that quote). The address is mail at FBM dot com.

Addendum

I currently have a shedload of UTF-8 data sitting in a MySQL database marked as Latin-1. If I tell MySQL to mark the UTF-8 data as UTF-8, the WordPress–PHP Gestalt Of Death throws a tantrum and gives me encoding errors. Wordpress apparently needs to have mis-identified data in its database.

It is safe to say that this does not make me happy.

Gearing up

You may well remember that I put this blog on hold some number of weeks ago. That number, rounding down, is ten: far too long. Therefore I am starting to post again to get the site back up to speed. When it reaches the blogging equivalent of 88 miles per hour, three things will happen:

“So when is this going to happen?” I hear you ask. Well, I shall tell you: Wednesday February 1st. One week’s time.

Expect the shiny.

On hold

As of now, this blog is officially in a temporary state of hiatus. I have a job to obtain, inspiration to seek out and a life out here in the post-university Real World to get up and running. The site MAY be up and running again by the New Year, SHOULD be up and running again by my birthday (February 19th) and MUST be up and running again in time for SXSWi. I may make the occasional post before then should something particularly interesting crop up, but I’m not making any promises there.

Again I stress that this is only a temporary matter: the site will return with a new design, a new host and possibly even some AJAX-y goodness into the bargain (although anyone caught mentioning the Buzzword Which Must Not Be Named will get a stern look and will be referred towards a certain mailbag which reflects my views).

In the meantime I will continue to update del.icio.us with interesting sites which catch my eye and Flickr with interesting sights which I catch with my camera (apologies for truly awful punnage there). As my current RSS client of choice is NewsFire and blo.gs appears still to be reeling from its acquisition by Yahoo!, those of you hoping to follow my blogrolling habits may be out of luck. All the best, and I shall return to the world of bloggery soon.

CSS Reboot

As was perhaps to be expected (mainly due to spending a month in America) I shall no longer be participating in this November’s CSS Reboot. As it stands, I’m not going to be able to get my new theme up to a high enough standard in time for Tuesday. I’m afraid, therefore, that you will all have to put up with this theme (designed as a temporary theme back in 2004) for a little while longer.

Rest assured that a redesign is coming and that Jonty assures me it will rock.