John Mee – Some programmer in Sydney

Well here it is, the new look johnmee.com

I’m not happy with it yet but if I kept on working on it till I was happy, then it would never be released. It’s one of those idealist versus pragmatist tensions that every software project must endure.

Things I am happy about are:

• isolated development environment – I’ve worked out how to run wordpress on a development server and tweak away to my hearts content without having to do any of it live and in production. This makes my idealist very happy and is worth a post of its own very soon.
• slicker look? – well the jury is out on this but i’ve switched to this inove theme which is darker and looks a lot more web2.0 – whatever that is. It has some very nice CSS which the idealist in me likes. More on this later.
• no ‘pages’, all ‘posts’ – getting to know wordpress I’ve been torn to know whether I should create “pages” on subjects which will stand (or move with) the test of time; or “posts” which record the moment in time. I’ve made the executive decision that pretty much everything I write will be a moment in time. Thus I have ditched the few “pages”, and moved everything into posts. It’s my blog so if I want to go back and edit recent posts so that they make more sense, then I blooming well can
• tags and categories consolidation – I’ve gone through every post and tried to consolidate the tags and categories into some sort of uniformity
• Travel letters imported – all my travel letters from years ago were sitting separate from the blog and in their original web format. I’ve let go of the past and moved them all into the blog post format for easier and more uniform access.
• custom category page – I’m learning heaps about wordpress. So much that I’ve probably got enough material on wordpress tips I’ll hopefully be bringing you a series on that. Important to me was to present the Travel posts in a custom way, which meant creating a special category template. You can click on the travel page and see what i’m talking about – it’s not the usual archive of posts.

There’s still lots and lots of stuff to do. Such as:

• images – no one was finding the photo gallery before. I need to move all my photos into the blog and attach them to the travel posts
• front page is too busy – as Mick noted, the new look is far too “busy” compared to the old one. He liked the simplicity and I’m inclined to appreciate the criticism. So very high on the agenda is to tone down the home page. Perhaps just show the last two posts in full.
• context sensitive sidebars – since I’ve worked out how to ‘program’ wordpress I know I can do something with the sidebars. I want the sidebars to be different between the archive pages, the single pages, and perhaps different again by category. I’m wondering if images down the sidebar would work in the travel pages.
• work on jamabelle – i know there are a lot more letters from james which are even more deep and valuable as they chart his global soul seaching following the break-up of james and isabelle. I must find the one where he hangs around with an Indian swami for a time. I think i should move these into the blog so they present better, but am not comfortable with it since they’re not my works
• trim the database – the wordpress database likes to keep an archive of all the previous edits and dead categories and links and other trash. Only a geek would care as it has zero impact on the presentation, but I want to clear some of this cruft. Just makes me feel like I’ve mopped and vacuumed or something.

These are the new and old themes side by side…

Do you prefer the old or new? Why?