So I did the whole css reboot thing, signed up and all, before even looking at a calendar and remembering that november is a good long way off. I didn’t want to wait, and figured that as good a time as any to launch the new design I have was along with the announcement of (and my upgrade to) Textpattern stable 4.0.
The upgrade was nice and easy with the help of Subversion. I’ve been using svn to manage projects since early this winter, but never used to deploy anything I’ve made. A one command copied the contents of my repository over the static files that were there, and then a quick import of the textpattern database from my local setup (excepting the textpattern table) brought station11.net up to par with station11.dev on my powerbook.
Things might still be a little sketchy in places, on the bottom of every page I’m using two plugins – RSS Live Archive, which works great on the front page but none other; and VG Related Articles, which displays a list of articles with similar keywords to the current, but either because it uses a bad algorithm to find related articles, tends to list the five most recent articles excluding the one being browsed. Or maybe I just use keywords wrong.
In terms of design I’m no hicks or anything, but I wanted to do away with the sidebar and all the grey, keep the brown, and add a little yellow to the palette. I wanted to make it easier to fish out old articles, so hopefully the live archive does that. And it’s not official yet, because I broke the css that differentiates ticker articles from log or read entries, but I also added a full site archive, everything that’s ever been published here for google to chew up at past.
I forgot to take a snapshot of what the site looked like before, but with the magic of svn all it takes to throw the old look on is one svn switch command: svn switch http://station11.net/svn/tags/one and I’ve got everything back to the way it was.
If you notice any big problems feel free to comment, there are probably a few I haven’t noticed. And god help you if you use IE, I haven’t even checked it that god awful browser once.