Nine Years Later
[Cross-posted from my MovableType Blog]
In a fit of "fuck it" this weekend, I pushed the redesign of my personal website live. It replaces a design that is just shy of 9 years old.
I was very pleased with this design when I mocked it up. The whole thing came together in just over 24 hours of hyper-creativity some time in early December (I think). It's only the second time a design of mine has suffered the translation out of my head more or less in tact. (my mom's site (while it still remains) being the other.)
The trouble is that it's taken quite a while to implement it, the vast majority of that time spent beating my blog into shape, and trying to cram all the blog navigation onto the page. I'm not done (the archives box on the left should not be fixed, but I need to figure out how to correctly unfix a descendant of a fixed container in a fluid design, it ends up relative to the parent, which is on the right. (I may break down and break it out into it's own container, but that breaks the logical flow of the (unrendered) page).
Adding to that, somewhere around the middle of my working on this, Salim pointed me at this post about "slugs". Unfortunately, I think our version of MT predates the "keywords" field, but it got me thinking about my whole blog archive structure, and I spent a fair bit of time redesigning that, which meant I needed to figure out the best way to expose the new structure in breadcrumbs.
Right before I pushed it live, I wrote a quick perl script to go through the database, pull out the entries and categories, and write out Apache .htaccess (permenant) Redirect commands, so that in the vanishingly small chance that someone actually reads my blog (or, more accurately, finds it in a search engine) the old links will continue to work. I'm actually a bit proud of that, even though it was easy.
After staring at it for so long, I've come to the conclusion that I hate the new design, I hate it's whole aesthetic raison d'être. But I also realize that it's light-years better than the 9 year old design. So rather than start this process all over again (for the third time, at least), I'm just going to make it live, and in theory, the new XHTML nature of the pages will make changing the design a snap. (Yay! separation of content from formatting! We've reached 1997!) Once I've built up enough energy to take a stab at it, that is.