New Skin

It’s time. It’s long been time.

I installed MovableType long ago to try something different. WordPress was something I’d used several times in the past, and generally happy with, but eager to really be wowed by something else. Plenty of sites I read use MT. Perhaps the old, more established Perl engine knew a thing or two WordPress didn’t.

Reminds me of the age old argument of Linux over Windows — XP Professional still runs on my primary computer if that tells you anything.

And it was fairly powerful, but sometimes easy things seemed more difficult than they had to be. Adding elements to the sidebar. Disabling your stylesheet for a day. It felt like MT was capable of much more than I cared to learn how to do.

So I dumped it to try out the new WordPress. Man. Talk about having power at your fingertips. Most everything has a template tag making it easy-yet-customizable to do your every bidding. Simple, semantic tags like wp_get_posts() make templating a breeze. The recent facelift for the Administrative Panel smoothed a lot of the sometimes awkward edges in running your site.

I’m also glad to be coding Brilla in PHP again. I still consider this site something of a hobby rather than a professional portfolio (though that’s slated to change before too long). So being able to learn so much in a “fun” environment provokes challenge and curiosity, rather than stress in deadlines and just getting it done. I can then take this knowledge and apply it to my jobs and gigs. We’ve installed WP on a number of sites at work, and I’m never looking back.

The layout could use some work, but it will suffice for now. Other recent additions to this site include sIFR, Twitter integration, and some other knick-knacks on the way.

Two weeks til finals! Oh man.. I’ll be home this weekend, Louisville.

Posted on Wednesday, April 16th, 2008 at 1pm. Filed under General.
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3 Responses to “New Skin”

  1. Kristin 4.43.2008 7:54pm

    Love the new look, Jon! Simple, classic, with a splatter of hoisin sauce for interest. Seriously, I particularly dig the William Morris-inspired background and the color scheme. “Web Dude Extraordinaire?” Well, we all have our idiosynchrosies.

  2. Jon 4.01.2008 1:53am

    Thank you, Kristin. I’ll have to seek out this hoisin sauce for myself.

    As for my subtitle, there’s plenty that’s a little bit off about me, but you got me to thinking… I’d be very interested to see how people sum eachother up in three short words. It’s like a micro-haiku; they should adorn every name tag.

  3. Kristin 5.15.2008 3:22pm

    Hmm. I think I’ll go with “Multimedia Design Diva.” Whadddaya think?

What say you?