Back on Track...
Posted by h3rald Fri, 22 Jun 2007 20:38:00 GMT
…or better, on Rails. Yep, this 7th (!) version of the H3RALD website is powered by the overly-popular Ruby web framework and by the Typo blogging platform.
Nope, I decided not to re-develop my website entirely from scratch this time, although I was tempted to, for three simple reasons:
- My “coding time” is close to non-existent nowadays, and even with a framework like Rails re-developing a site from scratch would have taken at least some time, which at the moment I don’t have.
- Typo is a fairly robust and feature-rich blogging platform, and after learning a little bit of Rails I could customize it to my needs straight away. URLs didn’t break thanks to Rails’ routing system, migration was easy enough, and developing the missing bits (like a rudimentary BBCode parser and a TextLinkAds sidebar) wasn’t hard at all.
- I wanted to take a break from my site, not code it again.
Fair enough, but why the new site anyway?
Again, there’s more than one answer:
- Lately I didn’t feel comfortable sporting a Cake-powered website - that makes sense, to an extent, right? Good.
- I got fed up with spam. I wanted to re-open comments but I didn’t want to implement spam protection for the old site.
- To be totally honest, I got fed up with PHP itself as well, after trying out Ruby for a few days and ordering and reading the 2nd edition of the PickAxe, which I highly recommend.
…But let’s say something about what’s new in this new release, shall we?
- A new, black (and red) theme. Something completely different. Probably not that good, but quite useful: Every day I check my site from my laptop at work, and if it looks like a big black blob I know that I have to regulate my monitor. I showed it to my parents on their old monitor, and they realized that perhaps it’s time to buy an LCD one…
- Comments, trackbacks, desktop client support, theme support, a cool admin area and everything else Typo offers.
- Full RSS feeds. With no ads. So you don’t need to see this black blob anymore, if you really don’t like it.
- No projects or bookmarks, just my blog and my articles. Let’s keep it simple.
More to come…
please please allow a diffrent color scheme ( black on white) or whatever .. now i have to use a bookmarklet on every page that resets the styles :)
greets,
I always suspected this was why Cake might eventually fail. Not because the code is weak, but because the core community drives people and possibilities away. Rails has always had a much better culture of openness and freedom. Interesting to see the first high-profile switch…
lol @ kabturek… The new theme aims to be relaxing for the eyes, energy-saving and different from the previous one (not that there was anything wrong with it, I just wanted to try something completely different), however I can understand that it could be a bit disturbing for someone… I’ll see about changing it or implementing a theme switcher… who knows!
Hi H3rald,
I hope to still find your articles interesting, whichever MVC flavour they may be.
I like the new site with the exception that I can read almost nothing of what is written in red :). Hypocritical though it may seem (I know that kabturek has his bookmarklet to hand when he visits my site, that he isn’t alone, and that I also need to put that style switcher in place). Please choose a brighter red or something else a bit higher contrast :)
Cheers,
AD
PS. The nav bar is completely invisible (at least to me) until I mouse over. I like black themes but atm it feels like my monitor has it’s contrast set too low and brightness too high – except of course it hasn’t. I wrote about colour contrast before, you might want to test your colours out on Snook’s colour contrsat checker In any event good to see you writing again. Cheers! AD