More site changes
13/04/09 11:11 Filed in: Internet
Slowly, in the background, big changes are coming to
this site.
Yes, these are going to be big, big changes. For this
reason they are happening slowly in the background,
on a beta site. This beta site isn’t blocked off from
the rest of the internet, it’s just hidden. I wonder
if you can find it...
Anyway the changes, basically these changes are I think the next logical evolution for this site and they pretty much mirror what has happened on the internet at large.
To explain, when I started this site, way back in the dark days of the late 90’s (probably 1997?) it was all hand coded html (and very badly coded, I might say!) This was hyperlands v1, which I sadly don’t have in the history gallery. It soon became clear that this was no way to run a site of more than just a few pages, so I started to use a specialist web editor, I used quite a few of them, so things like Hot Metal and Dreamweaver got used and this helped the site to grow in both size a complexity. This change gave birth to hyperlands v2 and a while later hyperlands v3
This worked well for a while, but I wanted my site to have clean and neat HTML, something which Dreamweaver couldn’t really do at that time, well not without editing the code by hand and if I where doing that what was the point of having and HTML editor.
So I switched back to editing the code, mostly, by hand. This give me hyperlands v4.
This was more work, but at that time I’d moved most of the content to other sites, so it wasn’t to difficult. I was never really happy with this layout, so I quickly moved on...
Hyperlands v5, was based on a template, albeit a template that I copied and pasted and then edited by hand. This gave my the look I wanted along with the neat and tidy HTML. The problem was that it was a manual system.
The Rapidwaver software gave me the content management system I wanted. I was now free to work on the content of the site and not just it’s style and structure. It’s this which has given my version 6 of this site.
However, there is just one problem with this. If I want to edit the site on two or more machines (and I do) I need to keep the files synced. This potentially tricky with 2 machines and gets harder with more! So I’ve been looking at web based content management systems. This came to me when I was doing some freelance work using the Drupal CMS. Add to this my new web host gives me a one click install for Drupal and I was sold.
So what is going to happen over the next few months is that parts of the site will get moved over to the Drupal system, then when most of the content is there and I’ve got the style looking good I will make the site in to a ‘public beta’ site and finally remove all of the old content. This is going to take quite a while, so don’t hold your breath.
At this point I’d just like to say that it’s not a problem with Rapidweaver that has caused me to move on like this, it’s just that I think the this is the way to go and now the quality of web apps makes this a really usable option.
At the moment just parts of this blog are on the new system and the blog is actually using WordPress, since the Drupal blog module seems to be quite limited at the moment. I’m adding old posts and mirroring the new ones to it now (this is the first of the new ones!)
In the longer term I’d like to move the whole site to Squarespace, which looks a fantastic hosted CMS system.
So why the intermediate step of using Drupal?
Several reasons. Firstly I’d just signed up for a year with my new host when I discovered squarespace. Also Squarespace can import various database formats, so I’m not wasting my time with this work. Finally, working with Drupal is good experience for me, I’ve had to dabble with it once already and it’s something I might need again.
Anyway the changes, basically these changes are I think the next logical evolution for this site and they pretty much mirror what has happened on the internet at large.
To explain, when I started this site, way back in the dark days of the late 90’s (probably 1997?) it was all hand coded html (and very badly coded, I might say!) This was hyperlands v1, which I sadly don’t have in the history gallery. It soon became clear that this was no way to run a site of more than just a few pages, so I started to use a specialist web editor, I used quite a few of them, so things like Hot Metal and Dreamweaver got used and this helped the site to grow in both size a complexity. This change gave birth to hyperlands v2 and a while later hyperlands v3
This worked well for a while, but I wanted my site to have clean and neat HTML, something which Dreamweaver couldn’t really do at that time, well not without editing the code by hand and if I where doing that what was the point of having and HTML editor.
So I switched back to editing the code, mostly, by hand. This give me hyperlands v4.
This was more work, but at that time I’d moved most of the content to other sites, so it wasn’t to difficult. I was never really happy with this layout, so I quickly moved on...
Hyperlands v5, was based on a template, albeit a template that I copied and pasted and then edited by hand. This gave my the look I wanted along with the neat and tidy HTML. The problem was that it was a manual system.
The Rapidwaver software gave me the content management system I wanted. I was now free to work on the content of the site and not just it’s style and structure. It’s this which has given my version 6 of this site.
However, there is just one problem with this. If I want to edit the site on two or more machines (and I do) I need to keep the files synced. This potentially tricky with 2 machines and gets harder with more! So I’ve been looking at web based content management systems. This came to me when I was doing some freelance work using the Drupal CMS. Add to this my new web host gives me a one click install for Drupal and I was sold.
So what is going to happen over the next few months is that parts of the site will get moved over to the Drupal system, then when most of the content is there and I’ve got the style looking good I will make the site in to a ‘public beta’ site and finally remove all of the old content. This is going to take quite a while, so don’t hold your breath.
At this point I’d just like to say that it’s not a problem with Rapidweaver that has caused me to move on like this, it’s just that I think the this is the way to go and now the quality of web apps makes this a really usable option.
At the moment just parts of this blog are on the new system and the blog is actually using WordPress, since the Drupal blog module seems to be quite limited at the moment. I’m adding old posts and mirroring the new ones to it now (this is the first of the new ones!)
In the longer term I’d like to move the whole site to Squarespace, which looks a fantastic hosted CMS system.
So why the intermediate step of using Drupal?
Several reasons. Firstly I’d just signed up for a year with my new host when I discovered squarespace. Also Squarespace can import various database formats, so I’m not wasting my time with this work. Finally, working with Drupal is good experience for me, I’ve had to dabble with it once already and it’s something I might need again.
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