New Engine, New Design
Posted by Skrud at Wednesday, March 29th 2006 at 9:00pm
I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, and after hacking around all week I’ve finally gotten around to it. I switched my blog over to Typo. Typo is a blogging platform built with Ruby on Rails. The biggest advantage of Typo, is that I can hack it up, make it my own, and pretty much do whatever I want with it. I love Ruby, and I love Rails, and it’s a pleasure to hack through Typo.
I learned a lot of stuff while coercing Typo to let static pages accept comments (for example, the about and Dead?Docs pages). I also added loads of stuff to the wordpress importer script so that it will import static pages, as well as convert categories to tags, and some other things.
The Logical Counter-point
Why should I switch to a blogging platform that needs my own modifications, when I can just keep on using Wordpress, without any problems or modifications at all?
The answer: I needed a change, and change is fun. Learning is a huge motivation, and playing around with Rails and Typo is a knowledge catalyst. :)
What about the old design? That thing was awesome!
I got bored of it. It’s my site, I can do what I want. :P (Don’t worry, I backed everything up first). I was especially sick of the dark colour scheme. The whole white-on-purple thing … it’s so emo, I don’t think it reflected how I felt anymore.
Neither does your new design, you’re a crappy web designer.
I don’t like using third-party themes available on web sites all over the place for a number of reasons: I like having something homegrown and it’s good to refresh my memory of XHTML and CSS every now and then. I also like the fact that my site looks different from all the other Typo sites out there. Sure, Origami is a beautiful theme, but it’s not mine. If it still bugs you, send your stylesheets to drskrud at gmail.
Lies! You’re procrastinating and you know it!
I have a huge SOEN 390 project work on. It’s a Task Manager written in J2EE and Servlets. I am so sick of task management right now that I needed to clear my head and work with a framework that I enjoy working with: Rails. I can’t imagine I’ll be very productive to MyTeam if I simply continue to bitch about Java, the SoenEA2 “framework”, Tomcat, Internet Explorer …
Sure I also have a chat server and client to implement, from scratch, for my System Software Design course. I’ve been letting my brain’s passive daemon processes handle the problem-solving on that one over the past week or so, and I think a design is formulating. Accorind a recent Lifehacker article, slacking off is a great way to increase one’s creativity.
There’s also an in-class presentation to be given in our User Interface tutorial on Friday morning, but we got the bulk of that done today, and I think we’re stylishly ready.
As always, feel free to leave your comments, and marvel at the really cool AJAX comment form… :)
