New Rootlike Site
I’ve known for a while that I had a place holder on the Rootlike site for far too long and that this probably wasn’t good for business. However, the grandiose plans for developing the site (inspired by the dream I had that started this whole thing) had been preventing me from even getting started–that, and I’ve been busy, as usual, doing more pressing/interesting work.
Anyway, I’m taking on some new web hosting clients this month, at least one of whom wants site design as part of the package, so I decided to force myself to sit down for a day and write a basic template for my own site to get warmed up. Among the goals were that I use both css and php, and that the new site have some degree of modularity. As you can see (if you look at the source of my site), these goals were met adequately.
I also initially tried using both NVU and Amaya for the template layout since they’re opensource and I was in a “look and feel” kind of mood. However, I found that neither ran well on my Mac, and neither even looked promising enough in terms of usability to bother installing elsewhere.
One of the things I learned (the hard way) years ago about being a sysadmin, is that you should periodically work with the tools your user-base works with so that a) you can help them if there is a problem, and b) you have some concept of their technological world-views. This is why I’m using WordPress on this site, and this is why I sometimes use Thunderbird, and now Mail, to check my email, even though I have a vastly superior mail client available (greetz Raph :) ).
The problem with this approach is that in many cases the software that is commonly available, or even “industry standard,” for the task at hand is so cumbersome in its user-friendliness, or just plain abysmally bad at what it does, that it is painful to achieve the simplest of tasks. I’ve come away from my latest jaunt with web design firmly convinced that there is still no editor other than vi.
Next step is to properly tackle symfony, which is an MVC templating framework for PHP apps. This also technically falls into the “using the tools your users do” category, since it was requested by a friend and hosting client. However, this person is quite a bit more clueful than I am when it comes to programming, so I doubt that I’ll have many complaints. So far, I have it installed and have built a “hello, world” app, but it is overkill for anything I have in the pipe right now.