Jul 30, 2006
The regeneration game
Still tinkering. Please excuse dustclouds and hideous errors as I continue to play.
Some of the things which you may or may not notice:
- random headers (there are about a dozen at the moment, ranging from scottish scenery to a rat with wings)
- integration for my distributed social media - del.icio.us, flickr and last.fm all appear in the sidebar to the right, now
- comments
- er…other stuff, too, I’m sure.
There’s more to come (when I get some time) including:
- site search
- categories
- archive listings (though everything’s here, I swear)
- proper pages for VD cards, album quizzes etc
- possibly some actual content (though why break the habit of the last six and a half years?)
First impressions of Wordpress (as a personal thing - I’ve been using it for a work project for some time) are excellent. It was easy to set up (even at half two in the morning) and I’m digging the vast range of widgets and plugins available to tinker with.
I think I’ve moved on in my web articulation over the last few years, too. From the early days of “stick it together with string and sellotape” html through creating custom templates and designs for established CMSs, to sweating over CSS and validation and pixel-perfect rendering… I’ve come to accept that where I am these days is much more in the realm of aggregation and tinkering - what you do with what you can find, how you use your web scavengings - than creating something unique and impressive at the code level. My site is already unique because it’s created by me - this is all my stuff, my opinions, ideas, wibblings and life.
These days, I’m quite happy to acknowledge and leverage the fact that there are other passionate people creating amazing content management systems and beautiful, flexible templates, themes and widgets for people like me to play with. That’s a great and positive thing, I think, and one to be celebrated.
In a lot of ways, my computing use has mirrored that line over the last seven years or so - moving from buying a ready-made PC, through large amounts of customisation and trial and error (and adding bits, replacing bits, upgrading bits) to a couple of years ago, buying all the constituent parts and building my own spec PC - bespoke, just right for my needs. Time passed, and now it’s time for another change.
As with my web world, I’ve done the sellotape and machetes thing, hacking my way through the undergrowth of things designed for other people or other uses. It’s time to celebrate well-written software which does what it’s supposed to and operating systems that don’t get in the way of my creativity and productivity.
Yeah, I switched.
Actually, in my case I switched back, since before moving to my present employer in London in 1998, I worked in magazines and was pretty exclusively a Mac maven, and before that I was often found trying to teach my mum’s Mac Classic to say rude words with its speech converter.
So yeah, I got a mac - a 20″ iMac, to be precise - and while I’m still in the throes of shipping all my media from the PC over (35K photos, several weeks worth of music…) and getting to grips with the fact that it isn’t emitting noises like the Professor’s car in Back to the Future (I had to mount extra casefans on the homebuilt PC to stop it overheating), I’m already in love with its sleek curves, bright (and wide!) screen and fuss-free interface. I love that it’s fit for purpose.
At work, my PC laptop does me fine, given that I spend a lot of time each day mired in presentations and documentation and spreadsheets. At home, from now on, where I increaingly play and create and consume photos, music, film and the web, you can call me Mac Meg.
And yeah, I’m smug about making the switch. Of course I am. I have to be: it’s the rules.
When you get your new computer in the Apple store, they give you a special booklet containing all the trade secrets on how to be a smug switcher. I’ve got a list of phrases I’m supposed to use in the first week (”It’s SO much faster” “I don’t know how I lived with Windows for so long” etc), a book of coffee coupons, an ironic t-shirt and a stick-on goatee.
I am now one of Them.
Don’t you dare drag us goatee wearers (growers?) into smug apple world… at least not until I GET a Mac (I will, I will, I will!).
Totally agree with you on the WordPress/tinkering front. It’s lost a lot of it’s appeal as there are so many good WordPress themes out there, why should I bother? (I mean, I WILL still tinker but not as much, nor as often, as I used to).
“These days, I’m quite happy to acknowledge and leverage the fact…”
You said ‘leverage the fact’…
You did. You said that. You.
That makes me feel like Charlton Heston at the end of Planet of the Apes: “Damn you! God damn you all to hell!”
me x
Oh, I know. I feel dirty.
How about we pretend I’m just reclaiming the word for normal(ish) people? You know - in U2 “Charles Manson stole this from the beatles, we’re stealing it back” style: “legions of consultants and MBAs stole this from physics: I’m liberating it once more for the rest of us”
No?
Setting up Hydragenic four years ago taught me many things about CSS, the most important of which was that I really should never, ever try to design a website from scratch again.
I now have a site that looks vaguely, but not quite, how I want it. It’s too close to my vision to junk it and switch to a standard template, but not close enough for me to be truly satisfied with it.
MT keeps changing things and I keep unwillingly pushing my templates forward, wondering each time how much longer I can do this. The sense of liberation experienced with other CMSs offering pre-defined templates is fantastic.
Oh, any chance of a comments preview thingy? I know that’s a bit rich coming from the man who took three and a half years to implement this on his own site, but God loves a tryer…
That fade-in thing when you submit your comment is lovely.
Wow. It is impressive. It is an upgrade. Well you said you would get round to redoing it. It’ll take some getting used to, the rainbow colour bars were always kind of uplifting, in a day full of boring or maniacally coloured sites. It seems to all be working with Mozilla including the random top bar - from Brighton to your face - the apples - very coporate - maybe Innocent will buy it off you) . Triple column format- verrr modern. And you’ve gone and switched to a Modern Albeit Crap computer! Looking forward to the fade in (if it works on Mozilla)…
I’ll second the coommenr preview request - you never spot all the spelling errors the first time. c-o-r-p-o-r-a-t-e
I’ll see what I can swing on the comment preview front. Having them at all is a good start…
I was kidnapped kicking and screaming into Macworld by my new company, it waspainful with the ibook, but they then bought me the 20″ iMac, and suddenly it was ok, almost like an epiphany. I am now bilingual, using a pc lappy at home, but have urges to change to a Mac here as well. The remote control, along with the whooshyness that accompanies pressing the menu key is the killer app, I think. Like the new layout.
I’ve missed being able to comment on meg.com (in its various incarnations). I’m glad to see comments are back.
And I’m glad to see that you’ve come over to WordPress. I need to start using a template for grayblog, as the current design is a mess and barely merits the word "design". I used a (slightly modified) template for my work site and it is a joy (IMHO).
What I’m not glad about is your use of the phrase "distributed social media". Don’t you just mean "stuff"?
Well, yes. I was originally going to write “stuff”, but then it’s more than just stuff. It’s stuff that has a social context - whether I’m sharing it, or exploring from it using tags or whatever. The social bit makes the stuff more interesting. The distributed bit is just a reflection that I’m using loads of other sites to organise my media - and rather than finding one CMS to deal with everything, I want to embrace the fact that I can now reference all those other sites through one CMS.
Anyway, I’m glad commenting is back. Askimet seems to be dealing with spam (for now). I like talking to people again ;o)
Welcome back to the fold, Meg!
I switched to Macs because of a job I got and became a convert. (Really, you just can’t be a graphics/media person without one. It’s silly.) I started dating a guy who was rabidly anti-Mac and managed to convert him. Well, i didn’t do it so much, I just sort of provided the environment for him to get to know the Mac, and the machine seduced him all on its own. He’s now one of those obnoxious scary zealont converts and we’re married. ;)
[...] The trouble was, in early summer, that the rest of my PC was crumbling - too many rogue apps, ridden with viruses and trojans and spyware, plus bloated and crappy in the way that windows can only be. So I succumbed to the hype and got myself an iMac - a switch which I mentioned back here. But, you know, from day one I’ve been struggling with iPhoto and its stupid quirks like a) file handling and b) version control (I know I’m not supposed to care where files are on the mac, but I DO) and c) rubbish interfaces d) the fact you have to tell it to show certain files within iPhoto: if it’s on my machine, let’s just assume that I HAVE imported it and I WANT to see it, shall we? e) the way that everything you want to do (from opening the damn thing up to closing it down and everything in between including organisation and printing) takes about FOUR TIMES LONGER than it really should. [...]