Launching a new website
One of the things that I have never bothered with much is my website. I’m just not that interested in it, which was probably evident to anyone who read it over the last few years, given that it featured five-year-old articles on, for example, getting forms to look good on Netscape 4 and IE4 simultaneously (that one was written in 2001, back when I was working with a web-design company called Vistech).
However the whole blog thing, combined with the fact that I’m looking to get a job after I finish my masters this year, means that I’ve taken another look at the whole “web-presence” thing. Also, given that I’m in London now, I figured it would be a good way of keeping everyone back home up-to-date with what I’m doing.
I had hoped to do the site with Website Baker together with a design of my own making, but a number of things got in the way. On the design front, while I got very far in the run-up to the Summer, I ran out of time to sort out the last of the cross-platform tweaks as college approached. And as for Website Baker – while it’s an excellent, idiot-proof CMS – it unfortunately requires that the host doesn’t enable safe-mode in its PHP configuration, and my host, UKLinux.net has it enabled1.
So in the end I went with a very nice design by Kevin Potts and have used TextPattern as my CMS. TextPattern, while a bit fiddly to configure, is nonetheless a decent CMS.
I’ve moved over all the content that was vaguely useful (the aforementioned Netscape one has been scrapped), and the plan is that I’ll keep this blog thing relatively up to date in future.
We’ll see how that plan goes.
1 Incidentally, I don’t begrudge them that: it’s a reasonable thing to do on a shared server.
