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2006-02-18, late at night
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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:
- Stick with WordPress: it works well enough and my time might be better spent working on other projects.
- 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.
- 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?
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2006-02-01, late at night
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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:
- In Firefox, when you move one of the navigation links into the “active” state (i.e. by clicking on it) the text re-aligns to the left. This would appear to be a Firefox bug related to use of the
-moz-inline-box keyword.
- In OmniWeb (and therefore presumably some older versions of Safari), the navigation icons aren’t clickable. As this works fine in the latest version of Safari, I’m presuming it’s another browser bug.
- The site looks somewhat different in Internet Explorer. This is entirely intentional.
- There aren’t many tags as yet (as of the time of this post, there will be exactly one). Give me a few days and I’ll have my old posts all tagged up for you.
- Oh, and the Internet Explorer 7 beta isn’t supported. Don’t get me started on the Internet Explorer 7 beta.
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.
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2006-01-25, late at night
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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:
- A new host, which will theoretically simplify the other changes (although will leave me subject to the whims of the DNS).
- I shall be upgrading to a copy of “Duke”.
- Finally, a new theme! For those of you who haven’t been sent development screenshots, I’m afraid you’ll have to wait just a little longer to see what the new site design looks like; rest assured that it looks a hell of a lot better than the current one.
“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.
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2005-12-05, late at night
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The blogroll has temporarily disappeared from my site’s sidebar. This is due to some apparent up-cockery at blo.gs: the main page gives a singularly unhelpful “sorry, but the blo.gs service is temporarily unavailable. please try again later.” message. The actual blogrolling feature, however, kicks out some random feeds which I don’t know and wouldn’t necessarily want to have linked on my blog (screenie).
This is a clear violation of the Samurai Principle of “return victorious or not at all”: a corollary of this would be “when someone requests their blogroll, never return them an apparently random list of links”.
Does anyone have any suggestions for alternative services which could provide my blog with blogrolling functionality? Alternatively, I may just have to locate a handy Yahoo! employee and kick them until it gets fixed…
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2005-10-28, late at night
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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.
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