A carnival of technology

It’s been a couple of years now, so I figured it was time for another change.

Until fairly recently, I ran this site from my own computer, usually the worst computer I had that could still boot, since anything better was being used for something else.  Besides the administrative headaches the MP part of LAMP was problematic for a machine with limited resources that had a tedency to overheat and crash.  Nanoblogger was an attractive choice when I moved back to HTTP, since it did all of the processing while publishing instead of serving.  Instead of a database it had a directory full of text files, and it created a new set of static HTML pages every time I wrote something.  I didn’t have to worry about overhead or any of the testing and debugging that comes with a web programming language.  There was no run-time to fail; either nanoblogger output new pages every time or it didn’t.

The main downside to nanoblogger is that it makes publishing slow.  Especially with the number of pages I was trying to squeeze through it, any particular blog post would take five or ten minutes to generate, whereas a dynamic content management system could have quickly inserted a few records into a database and regenerated the pages on the fly.  Nanoblogger didn’t react well to changes in categories or pages older than the newest 10, and rebuilding the whole site after some such major change took hours.  The other main downside to nanoblogger is that it’s not very well designed or maintained.  It has a plugin system of sorts, but it’s hard to use (bash isn’t the best language for doing anything interesting, for one), and there isn’t enough of a community to build an interesting library of nanoblogger extensions.  Nanoblogger is an interesting idea, but in practice it’s inconvenient and inflexible.

I don’t need to worry anymore about database administration or processing overhead because I pay someone else to worry about all that, and the hosting comes with a wordpress installer, so I figured I’d give it a shot.  I don’t know if it’s the best or easiest, but it seems to have enough of a community that I don’t need to care.

As for that community, one big snag I hit in the transition was in the choice of theme.  This version of Wordpress comes with two themes: the way it looked a couple of versions ago, which had the same sort of plain, slapped-together look I had with nanoblogger, but with different colors, and the way things look now, which uses a blue background behind a narrow white column of text.  The Wordpress default is part of the popular “fixed width” paradigm, which basically means that a web developer made some incorrect assumptions about the dimensions of your browser window.  Remember those pages back when companies were just starting to think they could make money off the Web, back when everyone had a geocities account; those pages that would say things like “Best viewed in Netscape 3.0 at 800×600”?  Remember how annoying that was twelve freaking years ago?  We’re doing the same thing all over again, it just takes an extra file to say it.

I don’t have a high opinion of CSS.  I understand why it exists and why we should use it, but I don’t think that separating layout from content can be done in something as unrestricted as HTML.  No one writes CSS for all HTML: it can’t be done.  You might be able to do something with fonts and colors, but what about all those <div>’s where your tables used to be, or the <span>’s that you used instead of <font>?  The average stylesheet only makes sense when paired with a particular template.  We haven’t improved anything, just changed the vocabulary and made the layout more difficult as tags turn into id and class selectors that never quite work the way they used to.  But CSS is what we’re stuck with.  I can understand when people take shortcuts to get something working instead of making it conform to what might be correct today, but seriously, we shouldn’t be specifying a width for the entire page in pixels anymore.  It’s like a single newspaper column all the way down the page, and I don’t even get to read Garfield at the end.

The theme I settled on was Zen in Grey, which I chose because it’s variable width and I think it looks mostly ok.  The CSS came broken, since the author apparently doesn’t use the calendar that was turned on by default, but a few extra paddings and marginses at least made all the boxes not overlap.  I don’t know how correct it is and I don’t really care.  I like this theme better than the other options I’ve seen, but I’m not terribly attached to it.  If anyone out there has the motivation to do something better, send me some files.  I’ll buy you lunch or something.