It's About Damn Time

11 Sep 06

I’ve kept this in the wings for too long – it’s finally time to unveil the new version of this site. If you’re reading this via some sort of feed, crack open a browser and have a look around.

The Design

The first reason I wanted to relaunch this site was aesthetic – I simply got tired of the old design. The new design that you see here is something I came up with months ago now, back in the springtime, when the trees were budding and the flowers were blooming. The colors of the season were my primary inspiration for what you see here. To me, the best part about it is that although I have been looking at this design for a while now, I still like it. I think it effectively represents my sensibilities as a designer.

Aside from simply looking better, I think that layout of the content (information architecture for you geeks out there) is more thoroughly thought out and serves the content of the site more effectively. I believe it’s easier to find what you came here for in the first place. Maybe you’ll also come across something interesting that you weren’t looking for as well.

On Going Wide

I trust that most of you will be able to fully appreciate the girth of the design, as I decided to design for a bigger monitor. I’m enjoying the roominess of it and feel it’s just right. It’s not too wide to become difficult to read, and not too narrow to feel cramped.

Under The Hood

The other, even more compelling reason to get this site rebuilt was technical. This site has always been and still is built using Textpattern – the wonderful open-source content management envisioned and created by Dean Allen and Team Textpattern.

The previous incarnation of Kimili was running on a heavily hacked, pre-release version of TXP, and over time it became more and more susceptible to spam, particularly in journal comments. It got so bad after a while that I simply had to turn off comments altogether. I was sure that the deluge had to do with security holes I opened up by hacking my old TXP installation to do some stupid trick, and for each hack I did, it took me further and further away from the possibility of easily upgrading the version of Textpattern I was running on.

It got to the point where I had to start from scratch, so that’s exactly what I did. I’m proud to say that now this site is running on a completely stock, totally unhacked build of Textpattern (with a number of plugins installed to tweak the functionality). Along with that, I am happy to able to re-implement commenting in the Journal.

Updated XML Feeds

For any RSS subscribers out there, there are new, vastly simplified XML feeds. Just replace your feeds with the one or both of the links on the right.

In Conclusion

Overall, I’m very pleased with the results, and hope that you are too. I’m sure that there will be tweaking and refinements taking place over the next few weeks, so if you see something broken or would like to offer a suggestion, let me know. Your comments are welcome and appreciated.

©MMII—MMX Michael Bester