Remember the CSS Naked Day? I’m joining in a bit off schedule, and for slightly different reasons: After a bit of finetuning in March, I’m going style-naked as a way to force myself into an iterative redesign. Plans are to “publish early and often” and use chillu.com for fast prototyping in CSS, so expect some inconsistencies over the next weeks. I’ll document the process as its coming along, and looking forward to your feedback (yes, I’ve resurrected the commenting-system!).
Behind the scenes, I’ve switched from Typo3 /Timtab to Mephisto – and from PHP to Ruby on Rails. Typo3 has served me well for the time being, and enabled me to develop custom solutions like the portfolio-area. It just wasn’t very strong on ease-of-use, templating, and simply not the right choice to satisfy the needs of a simple blog. chillu.com has always been my playground for new technology, so with the switch I’m hoping to spend more time experimenting with a solid framework and some frontend-goodies. Silverstripe (my employer) also builds an open-source blog-module, which came close second. My main objective for the switch was extending my knowledge, and I’m programming PHP/Silverstripe quite a lot anyway. I’m already missing the extensibility of the Silverstripe framework, but having fun times learning a new system instead – it’s a tradeoff.
Going naked also emphasises the most important thing in any blog: content! With less interface and configuration getting in my way, I hope to spend more time actually producing meaningful content, with proper markup and semantics. Mephisto also brought some new goodies out of the box, namely: Tags, search and comments with textile markup. Yay!