Upcoming changes

Posted on July 7, 2004

I’ve been very silent here lately for a very good reason. Actually for a number of good reasons, but the most interesting one is that my “blogging” time is limited and I have to make some choices sometimes.
So right now I’m more dedicated to the form rather than to the content.

What this means is that I have been working hard on nunonunes.org’s design lately and, therefore, haven’t had all that time to blog or worry about the content.
It’s simple, when your time is limited you either do design or you do content, one or the other.
And since my main target is usually content I have decided to do a major revamp now and get it over with never to worry about it again. For the next year or so. I hope… :-)

But seriously, I am really tired of the weblog’s look and I never quite got the rest of the site to look any good. So for some time now I’ve taken everything off-line except for the weblog and I have been working on making something which is clean, easy on the eyes, organized and consistent across the whole of nunonunes.org.

So far the major design decisions are taken, the weblog is almost done, the photoblog (yes, I couldn’t resist making one -if for nothing else then at least to spare my usual readers the download of all the pictures I sometimes throw here) is coming along nicely (if I do say so myself) and a couple of other pages are well thought over. The hardest part will be integrating the wiki into all this.

Yes, the site will be wiki-based. I’m not going into that right now (too late for that, I had a long day) but that is the only way I see it really taking off.
Now I would prefer to use some sort of wiki I could consider a good bet for the future but it hasn’t been written yet and I am not about to wait for me or someone else to write one so, for now, I’ll just make do with the one I found most promising so far - tikiwiki.
The bad news is that I haven’t even begun to look at how I can integrate it. The good news is that nowadays everything can be integrated, it is just a matter of effort, and the features it provides are very good for what I want to do so that’s that.

On the (more traditional) photo-album front things are still a bit shaky. Album is a very acceptable bare-bones possibility, I’ve used it somewhat and like it’s simplicity, but it does lack in some useful features. Gallery is more powerful, but it is a bit too much web-oriented. IDS is a bit too much on some issues and not quite enough on some others. Yes, I know I’m very picky but: “It’s my site and I do what I want to, do what I want to, do what I want to. You would do too if it bellonged to you!” (So now I’ve lost the two readers who have gotten this far. Great work Nuno!).

What I would really like to have was a system based on a number of ideas I’ve already discussed a bit. Since having written about them I’ve polished things a bit and I now know pretty much what I would like this system to do and it will feed both the photoblog, all the pictures used on the weblog or other pages on the site and the photo-album, but again, if I wait until I write it I’ll never have the site up and running, so for now I’ll go with one of the former contestants (or some other I find along the way) and we’ll see how my system develops.

OK, I’m tired, off to bed now. Hope to have at least a part of the new site up until the end of the week. Once again, lets see how it goes.