New Look
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.
What I did have unexpected trouble with, was getting my pages to play nice with Internet Explorer. What worked just fine in FireFox etc., could have very unexpected results in IE. I could fix it so it looked fine in IE but then it was “broken” in every other browser. (sigh) It took a tedious amount of experimentation and since I only had intermittent access to IE, we’re talking months of on-again/off-again testing, but I finally reached a middle ground where IE is still broken in my opinion, but functional and at least sort of “close” to the way it should look, while other browsers should look as intended.
So as a consequence, this entire transition took maybe 4 months longer than I expected/intended. And my existing old web site suffered as a result, since I didn’t have time to really update both.
Anyway, that’s all over I think and I should be able to update this more regularly while finding time to gradually add a few new features I have in mind. So check back.
