Blog redesign and moving back to wordpresss

Well, people who haven’t been tuning into the blog feeds via Facebook or rss have probably figured out by now that I did a pretty massive overhaul on the blog over the holidays.

Probably the main change under the hood that people won’t notice is that I moved back from the Rails-based Simplelog to WordPress.

Why move back you say ? What happened to me as Rails purist ?

OK, after a little bit of soul searching and a lot of testing of various Rails blogging engines, these were the three main deciders :

USP
OK, admittedly this is where wordpress really excels. I want to write, not futz with a blogging platform. Sure, I could roll my own blogging system in Rails. I had thought of regearing simplelog‘s code into something restful, cleaner and with some help from the github community, but taking on yet another open source project when a perfectly good alternative existed seemed kinda like tilting at windmills.

Too many things were just not quite what I needed in the Rails blog community though excellent blogging software does exist (simplelog, mephisto, typo and enki). They were all good and I did take a look at each one before deciding to slink back to WP. In fact, if I wanted to spend my time developing blog software they’d be great, but hacking on blog software takes away time from other, more important projects to me that I want to work on this year.

So, in the spirit of focusing on my goals in 2009, WordPress seemed to be the least no muss, no fuss. To bring it down to a business case, besides developing functionality in Rails (which I do really, really prefer), no Rails blogging app had any unique selling proposition for me.

One that did pique my interest though (besides the thought of moving over to tumblr, blogger, livehjournal or whatever) was Marley because I was really thinking, what I just want to do is write, though can’t get away from being a ersatz developer and local text copies that I can git version control and then just deploy via capistrano is not a bad way to go really. Lot of flexibility there (though I do really like using XML-RPC clients like MarsEdit to craft my posts).
Things working and being constantly improved and maintained
Much like my beloved OSX, wordpress just works. It’s got a robust ongoing development team and community and is tested before release. Simplelog was no longer in active development, Mephisto doesn’t really have a release schedule (with respect, the guys behind it are busy with cash money work though I just noticed in checking links that they upgrade the software to 0.81 just recently) and had some strange quirks no one could get back to me on resovling (ie. not showing embed tag videos form YouTube etc in atom feeds) , besides the need to use liquid templates to develop theming, typo still seems to have issues for me running it and while enki looked quite promising, the thought of redeveloping plugins I knew already existed in wordpress seemed like reinventing the wheel, which is something I’m generally against (unless I’ve got a much better wheel idea).
Plugin and theme ecosystem
A robust plugin system means saved work. I’d rather modify something than build something up from scratch that I know someone else has done. Some devs might like rolling their own (which definitiely seem to be the case in the Rails community), but for me, I’m a busy guy. If I can snap in a piece of lego that’s 90% of the way there, I’d rather do that. I spent a day throwing in new plugins into WP and most of the time hacking around with the css in the blog to get it doing what I wanted.

Same with themes. I’m not a web designer. In fact, I can’t even pick good colours though this is something I probably want to work on in 2009 (my design sensibilities and expressing them on the web). I’m great at riffing off other design ideas though and modifying them to suit my own aesthetic sense, so a good theming community gives me a lot of food for thought in terms of incorporating my own stuff.

So, there you have them. Sounds almost like logic rather than an apology for moving back from Rails (if someone does want to collaborate on a Rails blogging platform to take on WP, I’m all over that as long as we can agree on design goals).

Besides, with WP 2.7, I’ve git init-ed the code and am deploying it to the server via capistrano, so can mess with my local to my heart’s content as well which makes me feel pretty good about maintaining control of things from a dev perspective.

If you’re interested in some of the design decisions I took, after looking at a bunch of different themes, I took advantage of warpspire‘s excellent Hemingway theme and did some heavy hacking on it. It now shows just the latest post on the first page with an excerpt and I’ve moved the Recent Posts into the bottom bar.

I did this for a few reasons : The first is that it loads a magnitude faster now. The second is more behavioural. The vast majority of people looking at my blog do it through either rss feeds or via the Facebook link I have to the rss (which brings things in as “Notes”). So, a complete listing of posts on the front page is simply not how people are using the site. The other influence would be google search which is the other major gateway to AWWS and of course either sends people directly to a particular entry, or again to the front page for them to search.

Additionally, this design allows me to more easily represent a more complete overview of my online activities in blogging, facebook and photography (I also wanted to include deli.cio.us bookmarking and github activity but found that it made the design way too busy and most geeks would follow those separately if they’re interested via rss or github itself).

A few other things, I added the Subscribe to Comments Email plugin which I’ve found makes a big difference in people’s feedback that come in via google or facebook and the other thing I did was add in gravatars for the comments.

I’ve still got some work to do on it but wanted to push it up in time for the New Year. I need to play with the copy in Projects and About (people will note I’ve de-anonymized the blog finally after years of having it as anonymous as possible) and there are still some css things I need to sort out mostly dealing with link and hover colouring in the text as well as sorting out the navbar a bit more properly.

Any feedback appreciated. Obviously, I haven’t tested on all platforms and am still poking a few things here and there (and a big thanks to Tee for providing some initial professional design and usability feedback right after launch)