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New Year, New Look - Blogging in 5.0

Posted on: Thu, 2007-01-04 10:00 | By: matt | In:

Happy New Year! It's a few days late because these last few days have been filled with redesigns and upgrades.

After taking most of the last month off from blogging I am now renewed, reinvigorated, and ready to blog. But, before I could blog it was time for my blog to be renewed, reinvigorated, and ready to blog with me in the new year. Here is an overview of the changes. Hope you enjoy.

The New Look

Every so often I like to adopt a new look on my website and the new year seemed like the perfect opportunity for a change. The style is slightly different and rooted in my desire for clean websites with little clutter and lots of white space.

The feature that needed integrating was a more usable design. The last design creeped off the sides of the screen when being viewed in 800x600 resolution and the links weren't always easy to spot. This design looks to fix that as well as integrate some other usability features.

Looking back on my old designs I can see just how much things have changed. Thanks to the Way Back Machine we can look at snapshots of what mattfarina.com and mattf.org used to look like in the past. (I've had a personal site going back over half a decade.)

The Upgrade To Drupal 5.0

Drupal, the popular content management system, is about to make a version jump and I made the jump. I say about to jump because the software is pre-release but I felt stable enough to run my site on.

Some drupalers may notice I am running a number of modules that aren't released yet for version 5 like the captcha and comment info modules. These modules have patches to upgrade them to 5.0 (with the exception of captcha in non-English languages) available here and here respectively.

Since this is pre-release software there may be some bugs floating around. If you see any please contact me and let me know.

RSS Woes

As part of the upgrade I have dropped ATOM support. I am unaware of a feed reader that supports ATOM and not RSS so the switch should be virtually painless for anyone using ATOM.

Geeks and God

Curious why the Geeks and God logo is in the new design with us on a hiatus? I'll give you a hint. It's not for posterity.

Now that you have seen the new look, what do you think? Love it, hate it, or maybe you just don't care?

Comments

#1 I Dig

Submitted by Bob on Thu, 2007-01-04 16:04.

Yo...
Noticed this yesterday...lookin good.

Can you hook me up with a patched version of the CAPCHA? I'd like to get it on my site without trying to figure out the patching process....

Danka. And happy new year.

#2 Thanks

Submitted by matt on Thu, 2007-01-04 19:12.

Thanks for the feedback. If you have any other thoughts please let me know.

And, the captcha module is in your inbox.

#3 Capcha

Submitted by Bob on Thu, 2007-01-04 21:06.

Oh, and I noticed that the capcha never works the first time (tells me the response to the math problem was incorrect). Joe's does the same thing, so it's probably the module as a whole, not the 5.0 patch....just an fyi.

#4 huh??

Submitted by matt on Thu, 2007-01-04 22:23.

Are you having problems posting with my captcha? When I try in both safari and firefox on a mac there are not issues. Or, are you getting it elsewhere?

#5 Captcha...

Submitted by Bob on Fri, 2007-01-05 09:43.

Yeah, It was on Safari on a Mac. It seems to happen kinda randomly. Sometimes I have to reenter the math problem, sometimes it takes it. Like I said, it happens with Joes blog too...must be a little bug that's affecting Safari in the core captcha module.

#6 safari bug?

Submitted by matt on Fri, 2007-01-05 11:06.

Strange that it's happening randomly. The owner is looking to rewrite it and hopefully that can fix it.

At the same time, this just uses php sessions so I wonder if there is a safari bug.

#7 new site

Submitted by kris on Fri, 2007-01-05 04:27.

I like it! Now if only your place looked so neat and clean ;) I liked looking at your old sites on the way back machine. You've come a long way since links to Monkeypenis.com? But I think you need a guestbook again! <3 U

#8 Way Back Machine

Submitted by matt on Fri, 2007-01-05 09:14.

The way back machine is fun, isn't it. Being able to look back at what was. Though, looking back I wish I could erase some of those not so good looking looks.

#9 New site

Submitted by David on Wed, 2007-01-24 19:41.

Matt, the new site looks great. I am very interested in your upgrade to Drupal 5 and I am glad that it went well.

Dave

#10 Thanks

Submitted by matt on Thu, 2007-01-25 09:13.

Thanks for visiting. Upgrading to drupal 5 was fairly painless. The only pain I had was my own doing. When I moved from MySQL 4 to 4.1 I didn't setup the utf8 correctly and it gave me heart burn with the upgrade.

Though, someone else had the same problem and checking for this is not a feature request for drupal 6.