Site re-designed
I have completely re-designed the site. Again.
Some time ago I came to think that this site desperately needs more features. I even tacked my own news and polls implementation onto it. However, the more I crammed into the site engine, the worse it got. You always know when you screw things up trying to make them perfect. So did I. When I made sure I’d ended with an unmanageable ugly-in-its-feature-richness site, I gave up and started to look around.
By that time I knew what I needed, more or less. Though there are dozens of complete CMS and weblog packages available, the problem is to pick the right one. Such an abundance, multiplied by permanent lack of time, is almost a disaster. Moreover, fundamental perturbations became just another habit of mine, impeding all other, presumably more useful, activities. But I digress. About a month ago I made up my mind to wipe the dust off this site and started to learn what options I had.
Enter WordPress.
In my book, the main feature of WordPress is the purported simplicity of its installation procedure. So my plan was to make a test rig on a spare Linux box at work, kick the tires, find the theme I like, maybe change a couple of lines of code and clone the setup to my hosting provider. Sounds easy, right? Right?
Well, dear reader, web development is never easy. Your mileage may vary, but in my humble opinion web development is nothing but hacking. Like building a do-it-yourself car so that you can drive down to a shop where you can buy missing parts for your car which enable a U-turn so that you can drive home. Something like that.
On that Linux box nothing worked “right out of the box? (pun intended). I mean I had to edit almost every configuration file only to run WordPress. I am not sure why a typical install of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 was configured that way, probably somebody had played with it before. Anyway, it went like this: do something, find an error message in the logs, google it out, fix it, rinse, repeat. In a couple of days WordPress was up and I went looking for themes. My quest resulted in my own theme, though.
I’m still hacking the style sheet to work around bugs in Internet Explorer. Granted, I cannot proclaim myself a CSS2 expert and I don’t do web design for a living. But hacking CSS takes more time than setting up MySQL and WordPress and making a custom database back-end for the rest of the site.
When I was half way through, I installed WordPress on my iMac so that I could keep hacking the style sheet at home. It also provides me with a nice back-up option. Some day I will post detailed instructions. I promise.
There are still rough edges and compatibility bugs here. However, the site in its current form can serve as the zero approximation of a well-behaved weblog. Enough to move on.
I guess I have to admit that having a weblog is a work in progress 
