“We have the technology. We can rebuild him.”
After a few long evenings (and lots of chmod…), JoeLamantia.com is now powered by MoveableType 2.6. This marks a much-needed upgrade, since the older version ran on MT 1.4: it’s akin to moving from sail to steam.
I’d originally intended to move from 1.4 to 2.6 as a first step, and then immediately put a genuine CMS behind it — most likely Drupal — once the new blog core was stable. But after all the trouble with Unacom, I’ve decided to just post for a while.
As an experiment, I’m going to use MT to manage all the pages on the site, meaning that static pages and navigation will gradually disappear as I fold those sections into the blog-managed systme of entries and categories.
In the meantime, I’ve persuaded friends who are much better at development to experiment with Drupal, and report back to me on the install and templating systems.
I looked at using a wiki for this purpose, but again I’ve decided to wait and see how this approach works out for some others. With reference to the over-worn technology adoption cycle graph (which is second only to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs as the most abused example of a trite theoretical simpification of the inordinate chaos of the real world used by those without experience as justification for speculative buseinss decisions), I suppose this strategem marks me as a “Insidious Visionary” more than an “Early Adopter”: I select a likely tool or solution based on needs and trend analysis, and then convince others to actually try it and see what happens…
Unfortunately, the new layout looks like crap (again a technical term) in Opera and Mozilla for reasons unknown. There are no tables and positioning as almost totally driven by stylesheets. A deep and abiding resentment of the hassles of dealing with browser incompabiltity lead me to abandon development-based roles in the middle 90’s, so I’m going to just admit defeat on this point right now, and have done with it. Pending the move to a new set of templates in a new system, I’ll revisit the issue.