"donotremove" in Weblog

I know I’ve not been posting here too regularly but I’ve not been completely out of the blogging loop… I’m using Donotremove as a place for my more general articles on things like the emerging web and online behaviour with more technical stuff going elsewhere. For a couple of weeks I’ve been posting news for the Carsons over at Vitamin, which has been quite fun. They’ve just kinda left me to my own devices and the kind of stuff I’ve been posting reminds me of the kind of thing I used to write when I first started blogging - short sweet posts with a couple of links and nothing more. I’m also posting every now and again over at the Content with Style blog. On top of these two I will have a couple of work blogs to contribute to as well so all in all, I’m keeping myself busy!

While I think about it, the Carsons are running another of their workshops towards the end of August. This time it’s Professional PHP Development from the chap who wrote DropSend for them and it’s safe to assume it’ll be good.

This redesign has been 18 months coming. I did the original design over Christmas 2004 but I just couldn’t find the time to follow it through. Since then the design has been through several revisions, getting simpler each time. This version is the product of an anti-shadow and -gradient phase I was going through about 6 months ago, when all the shiny new Web 2.0 sites were coming out. I’ve mellowed a bit since then… I also really wanted to see a return for natural textures. They’ve fallen from grace since their heyday, back about 4 years, on sites like DNA (now redesigned) and the Hayward Gallery.

For the IA and information design I have experimented with a couple of ideas: zooming content and weighted navigation.

Zooming content, which I’ll write up properly another time, is basically content becomming more general as you scroll down the page. This gives easy and intuitive access to recent posts but makes the pages very dense and limits access to older content. To try and balance this I have experimented with the function of search. It’s normally an afterthought, consigned to the top right corner where everyone can find it but no one is encouraged to use it. With this design I wanted to try bringing search to the forefront of my navigation so it’s given pride of place in the dead center, right next to the primary navigation. This random access navigation is is supported by a fairly standard taxonomy, as well as more granular tagging. I still have about 200-odd posts to tag and perhaps 350 to categorise but I’ll be getting on with that behind the scenes over the coming weeks.

There is also liberal use of weighted lists, something I’d resisted up until now. I’ve used the same treatment for everything: categories, tags, chronology and projects all use size to convey importance. I’ve not seen them used as extensively as this and I’m not convinced that it will work but we’ll see…

The biggest change round here, for me anyway, is under the hood. I’ve finally diteched the ropey old CMS I’d been using. I wrote it about 5 years ago as a database editor for Access and I haven’t updated it since. Not that useful, really… So I am incredibly happy to welcome Symphony to donotremove. It was a long time coming but it’s been a pleasure to work with. It’s XML/XSL based, which gave me a fairly steep learning curve but now I’m on top of it I love it. XSL is incredibly powerful, even if it is somewhat clunky, and there is no end of documentation available on the web. I’ve tried Wordpress, Textpattern and Expression Engine, and none come close to Symphony. It just thinks the way I think a lightweight CMS should.

And with Symphony has come commenting. This is a new thing for me so we’ll see how that goes…

Damn it, I’ve just realised that I’ve managed to break my RSS generation script. I have no idea what happened - it’s not been touched in months, but I’ll try and get it fixed over the weekend. I’m seriously thinking of porting the whole thing over to Symphony anyway and this might be just the kick I need to get started… Sorry for any inconvenience anyway.

I spent a little while patching together an RSS2 feed. I’ve been meaning to do it for ages but I just hadn’t had the time. I’ve been subscribed to the feed for the last few days and it seems to be working, although my caching function seems to have a far longer delay on it than I intended. Still, I thought it might be worth telling people about it before I forget…

Man, that was a bit of a mission… For the last few weeks I have been getting random script timeouts on various parts of my site. There’s nothing I can do about that - the scripts haven’t changed so someone on the same box must have been abusing the server resources. Unlike normal db errors I don’t think there’s any way to trap timeouts so people were being presented with those rubbish ‘script has exceeded…’ messages, making me look like an idjut. Yesterday I left Fasthosts and their rubbish servers to find a new virtual home. I’ve settled in dc-hosting for the time being. They offer a wide range of packages, they’re quite cheap and their control panel is comprehensive.

This was my first time changing hosts since launching my site so the process was a little confusing. I wasn’t expecting the switch to be instant for my mail account and I didn’t think to set up a ‘catch-all’ address straight away so I’ve lost last night’s email. DC’s support has been great thus far, with super-quick responses to questions, so I now have everything sorted.

An additional benefit is that they’ve got PHP/MySQL installed by default on their Windows boxes so my planned migration to PHP won’t necessarily require me to change hosts, monkey with DNS records, and risk downtime and lost email.

The site’s back up and running and that’s the most important thing. So far so good…