Intermission
a creative coffee break from writing the play

I’ve been busy planning the move of Intermission away from TypePad.com. In the three-+ years I’ve been hosted at TypePad, the service has pretty much allowed me to focus on the content and not the mechanics. I’m not unhappy with TypePad, in any significant way. Sure there were times I wanted more. Isn’t that true of all relationships that aren’t meant to be forever? I’ve always wanted a header image, and always unwilling to pay more for the privilege. The only real gripe I have with TypePad is the inability to easily backup your compete post. That is, you can backup your posts just fine. You cannot easily backup your images, something even TypePad acknowledges.

It all comes down to an economic decision. When I did an inventory of all the online/internet/blah-blah-blah services we had, there was an embarrassing array of stuff that has accumulated over the years. (Hey, I’ve been online before some of you were born! Since before the Internet was born, even. Hmmm…. too much info.) A little TypePad here, a little dotMac there, a little WI-Fi everywhere… Time to consolidate with a single web hosting service.

At its best, the web is a great equalizing resource. At its worst, it’s a textual landfill.

Since I was fairly happy with TypePad, I briefly considered re-creating Intermission with Moveable Type or Ruby on Rails. Open Source was the way I wanted to go. For no real good reason, other than some of my favorite blogs are built from WordPress, I decided to go with it.

Simplistically, WordPress is a combination of PHP scripting and CSS files, which create a WordPress "theme", on top of MySQL databases. You don’t have to know any of those three things in order to use WordPress. Tons of other people have created templates you can use. Most of them are free. You can even hire someone to create a template for you. Or pay to use a canned "premium" template. Lots of options. You can even expand your theme with the use of "plugins" which help you tweak the template to do what you want. You gotta have a slideshow or images in your sidebar? Then, load up a plugin like this one, or this one.

Even with all the plug and play aspects of WordPress, I decided I wanted to build my theme from scratch. There’s a lot of documentation on the web about how to put a WordPress site together, using other people’s themes. Not really a lot about how to build your own from scratch. There’s been a couple of books on WordPress, neither of which were in the realm of geekiness I needed. Good for helping you modifying someone else’s templates, true. It’s almost as if no one really wants you to know how to start from scratch, and it feels actively discouraged on some ‘guru’ sites. The best website tutorial I found was Dissection of a WordPress Theme, written three years ago.

Fortunately, there’s something called the WordPress Codex, which contains all the documentation for WordPress. Most of it, anyway. Not always easy to find a specific picayune piece of information. You gotta read, read, read the Codex.

Why from scratch? I needed to exercise a different part of my brain, I suppose. I’m geeky enough to find it fun. None of the templates I found did what I really wanted ‘em to do. I’m capable, although it’s been many years since I designed a website. (Using the word "design" loosely, not in any pretty-fied meaning of the word.) It’s also easier to fix something if you know exactly how it’s been put together.

Once I decided to go from scratch, I knew I had to throw out my very old concepts of web site construction. I quickly abandoned my old copy of Dreamweaver, and stuck with BBedit for writing code. Long gone are the days of making HTML work by using, uh, yes, you caught me, spacers and tables.

Being the old-time programmer type that I am, I like to look at what experts feel are  "best practices" for coding. I read CSS, The Definitive Guide, and a couple of others on CSS. (I’m waiting for a copy of Designing with Web Standards to show up at my door.) The book that really helped me get back on track, because it was written in plain language with clear examples, was HTML Dog, The Best Practice Guide to XHTML and CSS. Made it possible to turn to The Definitive Guide as a good reference when needed, and especially to understand what the hell people were discussing on the CSS e-list I joined.

While indulging my reading, I re-realized how much debris is out there on the ‘net. There’s a lot of stuff on blogs and "content sites" that are not date-stamped. Many, many times I found myself engrossed in some article only to discover the methodology being proffered was sooooooooo outdated. At its best, the web is a great equalizing resource. At its worst, it’s a textual landfill.

Even though my brain is not as elastic as it used to be, not so easily absorbing new learning, I have not had this much fun with code in a very long time. There’s so much more to learn, and I feel I have just scratched the surface. Jeez, Ajax? What the hell…?

The new site is nothing fancy. I fear talking about  "coding" overhypes it. My desire is to keep it simple, easy to navigate, and hopefully be a little friendlier too. I expect to transition to the new site in a couple of weeks. My TypePad account comes to an end mid-August.