A Single Article

I will rebuild it, you might come

You might have heard me mention that I’m going to rebuild this site. I’ve finally figured out everything I want this site to have, how I want it to work and look. Unfortunately I can’t just rebuild it in a day, and I’m really debating whether to get started at all, before I get other things out of the way. I think I’ll work on it slowly, over the next couple months, so everything gets done correctly and nothing is left out. This means it will be a live redesign, so excuse me if things look messy for a while. I like live redesigns… except this time others will actually see it… even more exciting.

Here’s a list of the changes, additions, removals, etcetera. It might explain why this is a rebuild, not just a redesign, and why it will take so long.

• I might upgrade to Wordpress 2.0. It will probably be a good idea to delete the domain folder entirely, install 2.0 clean, and just use the old database. It might. I’m not sure. Maybe I’ll backup the tables, clear the domain folder and the database, and then just load the tables for the past posts. Come to think of it, I’m not sure what’s the best option. Anyone have ideas?
• I’m going to do photoblogging instead of trying to maintain static galleries. Static galleries seemed easy when I was just playing around with my own website, but now I’m doing a lot of other things and I have to streamline everything. I’m going to blog my photos on a separate blog on a subdomain, and then display the latest entries as an RSS feed here… basically my own “Flickr”-like system. Yes, this is the best way. And I do think using Flickr is dumb, but don’t take that personally. To each his own.
• The Guestblock and Radio Blog will be main parts of the website. Other things will be moved around, and that beefy footer will be reduced, only because I think it is ineffective. It was trendy, it was faddy, but now I realize it’s not ideal for this site. This site is meant to have the focus in the middle, and the rebuild will be structured for that.
• The colors will be similar, but other things will change. The rotoscoping (those pixel-dot icons as well as the header image) will be gone and replaced by some vector art and fancier image text. My mascot will still be domo-kun, though he might be met by some other friends of mine. We’ll see.
• I will probably use FACE. At least I’ll try it. My reason for using it is not so much to improve my own site’s appearance, but more to support the technique.
• Finally, the semantics will be better, and the blog posts will be structured to be more usable and intuitive. I’ll probably add live commenting and more styling of content to make reading and discussion more enjoyable… everything short of giving you a sofa and coffee. I would give you a sofa and coffee if I could, but let me work on one thing at a time.

These are just the big things, there are lots of little details as well, but enough talking. I’m going to get started, and we’ll see where it goes.