I have decided that this site will come back, but not with the current platform. This site is running on Movable Type, and has been since its inception. I recently moved my food blog off of Typepad to its own Movable Type installation (mainly because I thought Typepad to MT would be a straightforward transition...which is was NOT, but more on that at another time). While MT 3.31 is very nice and all, and MT is the blogging/CMS platform I'm most familiar with, I have decided it just doesn't fit the way I want things to work anymore. So the new version of this site will be on another blogging/CMS platform. I am going to leave all the existing pages exactly where they are, but build up a new file/directory whatever structure for the new site. That way all old linkage will be still working while I can avoid the pain and agony of moving old data to a new container. I had more than enough of that with the Typepad to MT move.
So now comes the fun part of deciding which blogging/CMS platform to use. At the moment I think I have narrowed it down to ExpressionEngine, Textpattern, and believe it or not Drupal. Yup, gnarly Drupal. It may be overkill for a humble personal site but I have recently been working very deeply with Drupal, and there is quite a lot to like in it. But it might just be overkill so I am looking at EE and TP also. (I'm sticking with a PHP based package since PHP is what I know the best. My lack of Perl knowledge is just stopping me from tinkering with MT the way I want to, and the way it works 'out of the box' just doesn't do it for me anymore.)
So anyways...that's where things are now. Stay tuned, as they say.
]]>It's not that I have lost my writing enthusiasm - far from it. I have been writing a lot lately on my food site, and I am going to be starting a writing gig shortly for a new Swiss community news site as well. I love writing, on all kinds of subjects.
I suppose that my enthusiasm for this site is at a low level at the moment because I don't know what the focus of it is any more. I used to write mostly about web design and development issues. They still interest me of course, since that is my day job (at least partly). Do I re-focus the site back on that? That is an option, though there are other places where I could do this too, such as at my old book support site which has a much more appropriate title. However, my interest in writing about web design issues is not that high right now, for purely selfish reasons: I feel that my personal level of CSS and markup knowledge is at a point where I am comfortable with it; until the next generation of browsers that fully support CSS-3 come out I have no personal incentive to learn that much more. (What about teaching others, you might ask? Well there is that but there are other sites that do this much, much better.) I am having fun learning some CMS systems - notably at the moment I am having a big love/hate relationship with Drupal (about 60/40 for the love, it's a great system really) but then again to write in detail about my struggles with it...I don't know.
The things I have been thinking about doing with this site include: making it into a portfolio site; having only major long articles (that aren't about food); or just making it a portal to my other more subject-specific site. One thing I think I will not be doing here is writing about my personal life. I have never been comfortable writing about personal details online anyway. I have gone close to my personal line of comfort several times here, but hey, I'm just not into hanging out my dirty laundry with my full real name plastered over it for the world at large to see. So, tentatively I've started blogging over at Vox, where posts can be made private or not on a per-post basis. I wish that that were possible with my current Movable Type install, or any blogging software that I can install on my own server. But for now Vox will have to do. I haven't even given out invitations that would allow friends and family to read various privatatized posts yet, so I'm not sure how well it will work, but it's an interesting option anyway. (Being the designer I am at heart I do wish I could customize the layout a bit more but the default ones are pretty nice, for now.) I also wonder why SixApart didn't put in the per-post privacy capabilities in Typepad, but there it is.
Until I get the time to find a direction this site, it will be a place with a few tumbleweeds floating by. Hmm, sort of like me.
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