After an embarrassingly long time with an embarrassingly fugly blog, its time to unveil the new, fly, iamdeepa.com!
I have to say, updating my blog was strangely mesmerizing. It was a fun opportunity to play around with WordPress’ advancements, modifying CSS/HTML and PHP in a variety of different editors, and in general taking a little walk down “blogosphere memory lane”.
I learned a few things while redesigning the blog this past week. A couple of notes below:
- Don’t wait too long to update your WordPress version! I hadn’t updated my old blog’s WordPress version in 4 years. This meant I had to painstakingly update by hand from WordPress 2.2 to WordPress 3.2 including dependent plugins and whatnot. Never will I be so delinquent in updating – its a pound of hurt.
- The maturity and cleanliness of WordPress themes has really improved. I love the theme I chose (F8 Lite by Graph Paper Press) and its free to boot. I was impressed by the variety of choices and felt kind of inspired to create my own custom theme. Once you figured out how the PHP templates all worked together, it was pretty trivial to go in and hand tweak changes – especially if its in one of the standard templates (like header or footer).
- I ended up hand tweaking a fair amount of CSS and PHP and tried a couple of different editors. I ended up being most happy with Coda. It was simple and straightforward and lightweight. I’ve become more and more fanatical about, whenever possible, culling together a smaller set of purpose-driven utilities for my development environment rather then having open a big and heavy IDE. Coda was something in line with that desire and I found it to be perfect for what I needed to do. I also briefly played with Mou, and liked the potential there. It took a little bit to get used to the hot-keys such that I wasn’t hunting and pecking down each menu, but once I got the hang of it I was able to write/edit prose fast and see exactly how it would look in-context.
I’m hoping this new redesign kickstarts me into posting more often. I have a couple of interesting posts in the pipeline about Flex as well as HTML5, so keep an eye out for those.
BTW, I tested the new site out on Mac only browsers (and not all permutations). If you find any issues, please leave a comment with which platform/browswer you were using. Thanks!