I am settling in on what I want the page to look like. I like the current layout better then the previous one quite a bit, although I am still working kinks out of the whole thing.

You might be wondering why I went to all this trouble. My previous front page was very nice. It had a good layout that was simple and direct. A classic two column layout with a logo at the top and navigation on the left. I wrote the whole thing myself too. Well, not the gallery, but I did theme it to fit the rest of the site. The rest was hand written by yours truly though. Everything from the database abstraction layer to the css, html to rss. So why scrap a good thing?

It was going to take quite a bit more work to get what I actually wanted. The previous system did used to have something in the way of an actual content management framework in place. I could log into a back end and put up new posts, with a threaded comment system in place as well. Trouble with it was that it was a bit of a chore to administer. I was constantly going into the database and clearing out spam from the comments (I got so fed up that I pulled the comments system out months ago), and the interface for putting up new posts was at best description “clunky.”

So I put up a development sub domain of my site, and started over with a wordpress based one. I didn’t write any of the back end code. I think I am okay with that. There are a plethora of features of wordpress that would have taken me months to code myself. I guess that is what it kind of boils down to. I don’t have the time or enthusiasm for hours on end of web development that I used to. I just wanted it to work, and I wanted it to work almost exactly like wordpress does.

As a bonus I can use a handy little application for the iPhone to update my front page, and that was really what pushed me over the edge. I would like to eventually take a vacation on the bike. During this excursion I would like to post pictures and blog entries detailing as much as I can stand from the road. Silly little thing to want to do. Seems like I would be escaping work only to make more work for myself. What can I say. Bit of a masochist.

So there you go. And here it is.

Have a delightful day my fellow monkeys.