Introducing etherfarm v4.0
01:00 on Friday, March 04, 2005 • 7 responses
As is clearly evident, etherfarm v4.0 is the culmination of at least 37 minutes of work. In actuality, I’ve been working on this version of the site off and on since last October, with the bulk of development really taking place over the last three weeks or so. It’s a complete overhaul which started with a decision to switch the CMS I use. I’ve already written in detail about what was involved in the switch and about the experience of switching, and that article will be posted next week, followed by occasional articles on how and why things work around here. I’m merely waiting for things to settle down a bit, both in my professional life and on the site.
It’s hard to conceive of etherfarm 4 as a ground-up redesign. I toyed with several layouts which differed far more from the last design than does this one but ultimately came back to a design which, once refined, seemed the most like “home.” Maybe that’s a cop out, but I wasn’t try to “re-brand” myself; the goal in this redesign was to make a website which I could reasonably maintain regularly—an activity to which I readily admit negligence. I’m not so naive as to think that the new tools and features at my disposal will make me a better etherfarmer, nor do I in any way think that regular posting necessarily makes for a better website. That said, the new architecture of the site allows me to update multiple parts of the site simultaneously without having to create multiple posts. There are some conceptual things which didn’t work out for technical reasons, and some technical things which didn’t work out due to conceptual flaws, and on top of that there are technical flaws with some of my initial concepts and conceptual technicalities with some of my flaws, but for the most part, I’m really happy with the results.
Some things are broken and some things aren’t yet implemented. I’d love to wait until everything was hunky-dory, but we all know that if I hadn’t committed to releasing the site this week, it would have remained in eternal development (a kind of geek purgatory, I suppose). Many of these things have been mentioned in the beta which took place in the last week, and many more are on my to-do list. The usual disclaimers apply—IE is crap and will break things. I didn’t even bother testing on Mac IE; anyone using that browser at this point in time probably spends their web-time on online bingo sites rather than blogs.
For now, though, all I really want to do is sleep. Enjoy the new additions to the site, which include the India 2004 gallery (for which I have roughly 40 more photos which will be released incrementally over the next few weeks), and a bunch of new recipes thanks to the wife and some friends. Older etherfarm content will be edited and/or reappear at an astoundingly glacial pace as it conforms piece-by-piece to the New Order, with photographs being priority #1.
My sincere thanks goes out to all the beta-testers and beta-peekers, who have been listed on the credits page. Those of you who find things gone awry on this site—particularly those of you who can tell me how to fix said things gone-awry, please contact me.
p.s. Those of you who link to etherfarm pages and hate link rot—fret not. This weekend I’ll redirect old URLS for old entries to their corresponding new ones.
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