Tech of Indecisive

Over the past weekend, I largely re-implemented the layout of this site. This is largely a summary of the way things are, and to a lesser extent, the way things had been previously. If you’re curious, this particular post is more of a brain-dump than a colophon, so expect my usual tenuous line of thought.

Software

The site runs on Movable Type, although I’m not a big fan of revealing exact version numbers of software used — while security through obscurity is a practice I generally frown upon, I also try to avoid deliberately setting up a race condition¹ between NetNewsWire telling me to update and other people searching for holes to stick things through.

I don’t directly interact with Movable Type very often — I’m generally looking at Ecto when I write my sparkling prose, Vim when I edit my templates, and mt-rebuild when rebuilding the site after editing my templates.

Formerly, I had been editing my templates in Dreamweaver and running another copy of Movable Type locally, but that’s a lot of extra work, given how I generate HTML. Besides, I really don’t care enough about the details of MT’s data directory to figure out why I couldn’t just copy it across.

Features

Comments are still off. Pings are still off. This is going to change soon-ish. Currently, I’m hesitant to turn either on until I’ve actually moved the site over to its real URL, although I can’t say I’m sure why. Here’s a list of specific things that need fixing first:

• There’s text somewhere around here saying I only use underlines in link text, but that isn’t reflected in the current style sheets.
• I haven’t decided if I want to allow anonymous comments.
• There’s no feedback mechanism anywhere. For the moment, everyone who I’ve given the URL knows my real personal phone number, so that’s not really a problem (although I don’t know how Teoma found me). I’m leaning towards randomized, rotating mail aliases and mailto: links.
• The last time the stylesheets properly defined the printed form of the site was I-can’t-remember-how-many-versions ago.

Vapor

I keep telling myself that I’ll code all the bits needed for this kind of site myself one day. No, really. The most recent justification I use in these moments of delusion is that the sites we build for clients use most of the same pieces, and I might as well capitalize on this fact and use my personal website to pick nits out of our shared code.

I have a fair number of friends who either IM me with good blog entries or are introspective enough to make for decent reading that I’m likely to preach to about blogging, so there’s a hidden subtext to this site, if you’re into reading chewing gum wrappers searching for enlightenment.

There’s nothing going on here to help me keep track of how much interest the world is taking in the place, and that needs to change eventually. This may (or may not) take the form of an ugly conglomeration of a server-side cron job, web services, and hidden links with accesskeys that normal people only discover by reading the HTML directly or scouring my About section for every minute detail.