reversion.

Last month I decided that I was going to change some things around this site. I’d grown increasingly unhappy with the photo Gallery problems, and thought I would move to a more traditional blog layout at the same time.

Yes, this would qualify as an upgrade, which means, you know, major amounts of pain. No matter what else I may have learned through this weblog, I’ve learned that I should never upgrade “just because.”

So I set up a new weblog using Textpattern on a subdomain. It looked like many other weblogs:

After two weeks of working with it, I have to admit: I hated it.

Two sidebars? Too much clutter. Narrow center column? Wasted space. PHP? Can’t make the URLs behave the way I want.

I suppose that there is a part of me that doesn’t trust dynamic database connections for websites that don’t really need them: I smell overengineering. Why introduce complexity when the application doesn’t actually require it?

I find it interesting that setting up the database is actually really easy, much easier than any of the design work that comes later. I’ve had zero problems launching those Textpattern websites I actually use. The problems come later, when the MySQL database server goes down. And requiring every page to make a MySQL call is so sloooooow. Pages took seconds to load, and that’s just. not. right.

I know I sound like a curmudgeon, but seriously, people. The right tool for the right job.

Still, I could have gotten over the whole overengineering thing — I have gotten over it for other sites, like the new Bookdragon Tales and my son’s site — but I couldn’t get over the clutter, the amount of “stuff” that a weblog seems to require on every single page. Some of those things I really wanted to add (blogroll, recently-read books, recently-visited web pages), and some of them would be nice to have (Textpattern’s referral and visitor tracking), but in the end the design never satisfied me. I am attached to my idiosyncratic website. The archives go backwards from a normal weblog, but forwards in time, so you can read them like a book.

So I switched back. No real surprise, and no real harm done.

I took some of the features that I did like and added them to the new Links section: a blogroll, recently-read books (the only part of Input that ever saw any change), and recently-visited pages. The last are links I’m passing on without comment, as I found that most of the entries in the Web Log were basically that. I’ve cleaned up some of the categories, added some RSS feeds, etc..

(Still no comments, though.)

Anyhow. Enough of the tedious self justification. Back to work.