mikeyboy.com

i liked the old design okay. it was a quick new thing when i switched to wordpress.

this new design incorporates a 3 column layout, built with techniques i learned from this old school tutorial at glish.com.

the sidebar is different - i canned the archive links. who wants to read this by month? use the Search feature if you need to find something in particular.

also the banner graphic, while it overlapped the content area slightly, i thought it could be more prominent - yet, less distracting.

the font face is defaulted to Helvetica, and will degrade to Microsoft Sans Serif in the absense of Helvetica. if neither is found, your system’s default sans-serif font is loaded.

oops, i almost forgot to mention - the images on the left are the latest feed from my flickr photostream.

there are lots of other little tweaks to improve readability and usability. plus a few that might be functional or fun (doesn’t that first line of each paragraph look darker?) enjoy! feel free to comment if you have questions or concerns.

yes, both relevant to this post, and a musical reference (song by 10,000 maniacs). anyway.

this post is, actually, about the weather. this past christmas, carrie gave me an Oregon Scientific WMR968 Weather Station. those of you who know me might remember that i’m a weather geek. or you may have glazed over that detail, because it’s mundane. anyway.

like any competent weather station, it measures: temperature, relative humidity, barometric pressure, rainfall, wind speed and direction. but the geekiest feature is that the base station connects to a computer via serial cable. i’ve got it hooked up to my server at home, and it’s logging meteorological data 24/7.

there are various open source packages to interface with this data, as well as to submit it on intervals to sites like weatherunderground.com.

i will be developing a widget to embed the data on this site and my other sites, so keep an eye out for that. why do you need to know what the weather’s like on my back deck, exactly? that’s for you to decide. i’m just enjoying the programming challenge.

so, i’m trying an offline blogging tool again. i’ve recently purchased TextMate - a really great code editor for Mac OS X.

it turns out TextMate has a “Blogging” bundle that i can use to push new posts to my blogs. all b’zillion of them. let’s see if it works — if you’re reading this, welcome to a brave new world (again).

something has changed here!

after just a few years running the Drupal content management system, i’ve switched again. this time, to WordPress.

why?

because i want to be like the coolkids. no, i kid. sorta.

because i don’t need Drupal. i don’t need the extensive community-supporting framework. i just need a blog, and i want the most advanced blog software available. i want to get into developing themes and plugins as well, and this allows me to concentrate on making them for one system.

so, to begin all this, i made this theme. from the ground up, created every file and wrote (almost) every line. the only parts of code i repurposed were the logic for conditional comment display (from the default WordPress theme), and a CSS reset developed by Eric Meyer. (read my CSS file, i attribute the code to him).

for now, things may be sparse and not every dark corner may have been fully fleshed out. i’m working on it. but i’ve been getting emails from people (hi, mom!) wondering why i haven’t updated my site in a while. well, this is why.

yes, things look quite different. let me explain.

i’ve switched web hosting companies, which in itself should not make a marked difference in the site. but while i did this, i upgraded my site to the latest release candidate of Drupal, an Open Source website management system (they call it “community plumbing” and i think that suits it well).

so now i’m on Drupal 5.0 RC1, instead of Drupal 4.7.4. this is the default theme, “Garland” with a few little tweaks. i will be further updating the php code to fix a few pecadillos that i’ve observed, but other than that, i think the out-of-the-box experience with Drupal 5.0 RC1 has been fantastic.

mikeyboy.com has once again changed content management systems.

what does this mean? it depends who’s asking! for anyone who reads this (my god, why do you bother reading this?) anyway.

for a normal visitor to the site, you’ll notice things look a bit different, and the organizational structure is new.

hopefully this means the site will be easier to navigate. it also means, that’s it’s much easier for me to create new content — so i have one less excuse as to why i don’t do that more often.

for any geeks in the audience, i’ve switched from the mambo server content management system to the drupal framework.

why? various reasons.

why i left mambo:

fragmentation and disorganization.

this happens to a lot of open-source projects: they try to be everything to everybody, and turn out to be a big mess. the quality of the code is suffering under the burden of so many features crammed into the core product.

not easy to use.

it’s quite difficult for a single-owner website operator to just post new content using mambo. i wanted more of a blog; not to swim through administrative menus just to create a new content page.
if anyone wants to argue “well mambo CAN do that, silly!” i say: it was not intuitive, nor apparent after consulting the documentation. so if a feature cannot be utilized by an average user: it’s not there. don’t argue that a product can do things that only the products creators can find or decipher.

not web standards compliant, in the least.

the html output of mambo is horrific. like really nasty 1997-type stuff. nested tables, spacing hacks, horror show. not semantic, not logical. i would never write code like that, period. so why have it representing me underneath my personal website?

why i chose drupal:

“community plumbing” is their motto, and i like that.

you do the behind-the-scenes heavy lifting, and leave the window dressing (that is, what the end-user sees) to me. both design AND client-side code.

simpler, yet more robust user model.

create rights groups and let users do certain administrative tasks, or not.

integrated administration.

the admin functions are integrated into the main website once a user is authenticated. there’s no “admin site” and “public site.” this is especially useful for community sites where various users will have different levels of access. why maintain 2 disparate interfaces?

i could continue, but i think the reader gets my point.

i hope you enjoy the new mikeyboy.com as much as i (now) enjoy writing, designing, and administering it!