Eating my own dogfood

Friday, January 9th, 2009

If you have visited my site before you are probably noticing some drastic changes and long overdue upgrades.

After years of being too busy to update my built-by-hand HTML site I have finally taken the advice I give to all my clients and moved the site into a database driven solution. Although it was a tough choice between Plone, Drupal, Joomla and WordPress I finally decided on WordPress.

One reason is that my site is small and basic and I wanted to demonstrate how nicely WordPress can serve as a content management system for simple sites like this. I have added a couple bells and whistles for usability and fun.

In the middle of this redesign, or more toward what I thought was the end really, WordPress released a new version that had me going back to the drawing board for a while since the plugins I had planned to use were not up to date and compatible with the new version. Needless to say I was not such a happy camper at first, but in the end I think the site is better for the changes.

For the curious and technically inclined, here’s a list of what I have used on top of WordPress 2.7:

• • Add to Any - powers “share this” so you can send a page to email or other sites.
  • Akismet - an absolutely necessary comment spam blocker.
  • Ax-sidebar - lets you post custom information in the sidebar
  • Contact Form 7 -a nice simple contact form
  • Executable PHP Widget - needed to get more control of the sidebars
  • Flexi Pages Widget - great navigation tool for sub-sections
  • NextGen Gallery- for management and display of the portfolio screen shots
  • Post Tabs - nice inline tab tool

Its still not perfect and I hope to find the time between clients to keep improving the site but hopefully having a CMS and all the nifty plugins will result in making it easier to keep this site up to date and useful for my visitors. I have plans for expansion in the near future and am also starting up a Email newsletter that I hope folks will find useful and fun. Thanks for visiting and feel free to leave your thoughts about the redesign in the comments.