New Look
OK. Tell the truth. What do you think of the new look for the site? ...
Cording.org gets a makeover.
I was using Mambo as my content management software, which I liked very much. Sometimes though, it seemed a bit overkill for my day-to-day needs, but it provided a level of detail and control that was great.
Meanwhile, I had been wanting more experience with Ruby, so I thought maybe I could find a CMS that was written in Ruby. I had a look at Typo, but it seemed to be in flux at the time. Finally settled on Mephisto. I used iWeb to design the look I wanted, then converted the result to Liquid stylesheets with a Mephisto backend. I’m happy with the result.
I like Apple iWeb’s easy drag-and-drop design, but the resulting code is not as clean as I would expect, and without the database content management backend, it’s too much trouble on a daily basis. What I’d really like to see is some kind of mash-up of iWeb’s ease of layout with Mephisto’s wonderful backend simplicity. Since that doesn’t exist yet, I had to do it by hand. Along the way, I learned a lot about CSS, Liquid, Mephisto and Ruby.
For me anyway, I have to have a real project, even if just a small one, and bump up against real problems on my way to a real result that I care about, in order to learn what I’m doing.
