ucantblamem

You know that whole thing about Simplelog and moving my digital life to Ruby? Yeah, well… Ummm… Maybe I lied… Or maybe the night after I wrote that post I discovered two flaws in my swift move to a new blogging engine that sent me running back to the safety of Wordpress???

You see, I have just under 100 blog posts and almost the same number of comments, which unfortunately wouldn’t have been as easy to move as simply doing a dump from one database and an import into the other… This alone was obviously a large hurdle to clear, but there was one other very important point that I hadn’t considered.

You see, Simplelog, which I still maintain is a lovely piece of software, doesn’t have an HTML editor like Wordpress. The preferred method of marking up different parts of text in Simplelog is via Markdown or Textile. While both these technologies aren’t new to me, I have never had to use them for prolonged periods or think about the ramifications of trying to do a conversion from Markdown (or Textile) to HTML if I one day migrate to a new blogging system.

HTML editors have long been something that I have tried to avoid, they are often riddled with bugs and I have yet to see one that (consistently) produces Valid HTML. That being said, after no more than a week without one, I really started to miss the mildly featured editor included in Wordpress.

What this added up to in the end was a fairly simple realisation; My move away from Wordpress wasn’t duely warranted! My reasons for moving were not that I was unhappy with what I had, but more inline with a gen-y/grass-is-greener sentiment.

So, I’m sticking with Wordpress; It has serverd me well for some time now and will continue to deliver my Bris-vegas flavoured word-soup in a timely and valid fashion, hopefully for years to come.

A light respray

I suppose I should comment a little on the new design; You know the one that I had completely templated Simplelog in and then re-templated Wordpress with, in about 2 hours on Monday night?

As a quick precursor, you should know that: I’m a statistics whore… I check my Analytics account fairly often, to see how much love the collective “netâ€? is sending my way. A couple of particular statistics have been playing on my mind for a few months now:

1.100% of people visiting this site have a screen-resolution of 1024 x 768 or above (old site was optimised for 800 x 600)
2.90% of people are using a modern browser (anything other than IE6).

That last statistic is really good news for me… Not just because I have an abnormal-hatred for IE6, but very much because it means I can take advantage of some more advanced CSS available in just about every other modern browser besides IE6 (ah, the distain).

On top of increasing the default resolution and bringing the stylesheet into the 21 Century, I also wanted to go nuts with Accessibility tweaks and progressive enhancement. I have read “DOM Scriptingâ€? by Jeremy Keith and “JavaScript: the definitive guideâ€?, so I don’t really normally like or have a need for JavaScript libraries… However, I did want to implement some decent looking animation features, which calls for some heavy-lifting; My little friend Mootools came to the rescue, providing me with some light-weight tools to implement a Moo’ version of lightbox for images, some extra styling elements (like the selected menu-item in the main-menu) and little trinkets like extracting the “citeâ€? attribute from blockquotes and inserting it below the quote on screen (if it’s a link, the script makes the cite clickable also).

Take me with you

As a solute to great designers like Dan Cederholm, there’s use of Microformats on the site and wherever possible I’ve used em’s instead of px’s, so you can resize your browser’s text-size to your hearts content and the layout follows suite. The one final thing I’ve been wanting to implement forever, is to be as nice as possible to mobile devices. Now, my stats have never shown so much as a hint of someone wanting to view the site on a mobile device, but there is something like 10 times more mobile phones than internet-enabled computers in the world (possible over-exaduration) and I want to get a head start on skilling myself up for the future.

Here’s an exercise for the viewers at home; Resize the browser; Something under 800 pixels wide (small in other words) and you’ll notice that some JavaScript kicks in and displaces the layout. Now, obviously the site is optimised for computers and is probably feeding an average of about 100Kb down your telephone line everytime you request a page, which is made quite a bit slower when you’re using GPRS. So, really we’re starting out on the wrong foot if we were going to make a truly mobile-friendly site… But, at least we’re giving that 0.000001% of people a chance to actually read something on the page, right? ;-)

A place for everything

The one (small) final thing that should be noted is that there is no longer a Joomla! category and obviously, no more Joomla! articles. We will be VERY shortly launching the new SM2 website and not long after it the SM2-Joomla! website, which will have a little section dedicated to articles on developing for Joomla! This will be the new home of anything that I say publicly on the subject of Joomla!, but I will keep you posted on the launch of that site in-case your interest is piqued by the subject.

I have always been and will continue to be a web-developer who’s design work is focused on the content and not the eye-candy, but I hope you enjoy the new look and have a better reading experience because of it. If you find any issues with the site or you feel that the design doesn’t in-fact facilitate readability, please let me know. You can throw all your experience and knowledge at a design, but in the end, the true measuring-stick is the voice of the people using it.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 17th, 2007 at 6:44 am and is filed under Design, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.