I’m participating in Indie Relief, all proceeds of Lexikon from today January 20th will be donated to Doctors without Borders. Over 100 developers for the Mac and iPhone are participating, so go check Indie Relief and get great Mac/iPhone software while helping out Haiti.
It seems to be a familiar tune to see a blog powered by Ruby on Rails to switch from Typo, Mephisto or Simplelog to WordPress. WordPress may not be as new or exciting, but it has features that really matter. It’s stable, it’s actively developed and it’s not resource intensive. Also it’ll work great with my favorite blog editor MarsEdit.
I first blogged on a WordPress blog. When Textpattern came out I switched to it. Then I switched back to WordPress when Textpattern didn’t quite scratch my itch. Then came a long flirtation with blogs built using Ruby on Rails. First there was Typo and it was good, but it didn’t work well on shared hosting. It became more and more bloated and harder to deal with. Next I switched to Mephisto, which was good, but it required using the Liquid templating language, which severely limited the ease and power of the templates. Then came Simplelog which is slick and most of what I want from a blogging engine, but development has stopped. When I’ve looked at the code intending to implement the features I want, it becomes a toss-up if I should just start from scratch or try working them in. All the time WordPress has been sitting quietly on the sidelines with all the features I want, it just doesn’t have a useless yellow (or should I say Ruby) vinyl sticker that makes it seem cooler to this web geek.
The new look is mostly complete and I’m going to go ahead and make this live. I accessorized the design initially with icons all from the Famfamfam silk icon set. However it didn’t cover everything I wanted and the visual style was too varied for mine and those I had look at the initial design’s tastes. I decided to look at other icon sets, starting with those I already knew about. A particular set by Dan Cederholm sold in his icon shoppe fit nicely. The logotype was done by my talented friend Scott Twede.
The idea of this website has existed in some form or another for an embarrassingly long time. However the time is right to make it happen. A timely message showed up in my newsreader about The Perfect First. A useful reminder that I could spend weeks fretting over the perfect post to kick start this whole affair when I should simply get going and doing.
What did I do to get out of my rut? It’s turned out that the best way to get moving forward was to throw out what ideas I had most gotten attached to. The domain porteighty.com and a shade of blue #003366. I recently moved to Sweden and that opened up another avenue to think about with regards to the domain. I found a list of words ending with se. After reading through the words and getting overwhelmed by the options I was up back by the top with clockwise on the screen, and since it was available I decided to go with it. A visit to Adobe’s kuler and I had a color scheme by Mats Holmberg called Orange on Olive. I swapped the orange for Falu red since I liked the aesthetics better and it could pay homage to my new home at the same time.
I’m not quite sure on the voice that will emerge here. I intend to talk about web development and specifics to doing it as a freelancer in Sweden. There will probably also be random things along the way. Though it’s entirely possible that as time goes it evolves into something different.