Looking back into my past....web designs.

As you can probably tell from the lack of posts since last week, becoming and remaining organised hasn't got any easier.  That's not to say I haven't been working on the 'site though!

Before I tell you what I've been doing though, let me explain myself a little.  I'm a bit of an arty-farty type, and have been drawing, painting and creating for longer than I can remember.  I started making websites to share my images in high school, creating simple little html-only sites with tables and the like.

At undergraduate I tried again, learned Perl, and created a new website on my groovy domain 'www.entanglement.co.uk'.  This included writing some nifty perl-powered widgets such as a chat form and notepad.  I also created one which would match up an image with its text discription and create a page to display both, so I didn't have to code every single one by hand.  As you can tell, I decided early on that hand-coding every image gallery page was a mug's game.

Eventually discovering CSS made my layouts a lot prettier, but alas didn't help overly much with the automation - it was still necessary to ssh and ftp into the server to edit pages and upload files.  In the years since, I've worked on-and-off on various incarnations of Entanglement, but I've always been stymied by difficulties with managing the upload and display of large numbers of images, their accompanying descriptions and complex web of interconnections and dependencies.  This added a prohibitive amount of time to every attempted update.

As you might be able to tell from the images so far, I've just been taking a nostaligic stroll through Entanglement using the Wayback Machine (a fabulous resource, check it out any time you want some netstaslgia), cringing at my '03 self's idea of complete sentences, crying over broken links and being vuagely amused by what I thought were appropriate taglines:

• I am the nemesis of the vole
• Premium Cardboard.
• clickclick, little clickers
• A distinct tendency to orange.    

Sadly, the Wayback Machine doesn't hold a copy of my last foray into web design, which took me months of research and development, and which I was incredibly proud of.   It was a clean, simple, dark layout, with simple navbar anchored above, footer below, and a contents box framed by logo and signature.  This contents box paired square images of my jewellery and other creations beside a free box which could containe text, thumbnails etc.  It was beautiful, and perfectly showed off my jewellery photographs, which were improving hugely at the time.  Alas, a server and then laptop crash ate all the files.  Nom, nom, nom, your work is gone.

After this last crushing defeat, and without the time or inclination to recreate my masterpiece and set up a proper content management, I made a simple static page, which links to content which I do update, based around other people's CMSs (blogger and DeviantArt).

As you've probably figured out by now, I didn't take this course to learn HTML and CSS - I've done it before, and I've had more than my fair share of dead-end web projects that don't survive the long slog of manual updating beyond the initial frenzy of setup.  Instead, though I will be using the skills I learned in these areas to control the appearance and behaviour of my site and its contents, my main driver is something a bit more ambitious.  I want to use this project as a goad to myself to set up and use a CMS-based website for both personal and science communication content, including this project.

With this intent in mind, I've spent the past couple of weeks working with my partner to set up Wordpress on his server.  It's been an interative, collaborative process: he installed the thing, I struggled with it for a while then told him what was broken, he cursed and fixed it, rinse, repeat.  I owe him some cookies, I think.  In any case, as of this morning, it is now apparently mostly working!  There was much rejoycing.


Now comes the long, slow process of customising a Wordpress theme, but I think this post is quite long enough for now.