AaronBaecker.com

Refreshing Glasses of Water on a Hot Summer Day in Bermuda

The few of you who have followed this blog with any regularity know that it goes through periods of activity followed by long stretches of inactivity.  You may consider this a period (albeit brief, so far) of activity.

The updated design of AaronBaecker.com has been in the works since summer of 2010.  On the surface, it’s a re-imagining of the site’s look-and-feel.  Under the covers, it takes advantage of some of WordPress 3′s new functionality, as well as implements the site in HTML5.  There’s not really any CSS3 gimmickry here, yet, but it’s on my radar.

HTML5 won’t be a big deal to those of you who don’t know much of anything about the way web sites are created, but it’s an intriguing bit of data to those who may dabble in the web space.  This isn’t just HTML5 in terms of those tags that will be recognized by all browsers – it’s HTML5 through-and-through with some bits of magic applied to make it work in legacy browsers (yes, even IE 6 delivers a fair representation of the site, I think).  You’ll notice the site doesn’t actually validate to HTML5, but I’ll blame that on a combination of WordPress auto-generated markup and embeds.  I think that realistically accounts for all of the validation errors.

I’ll take you on a brief tour of the new site:

Web Fonts: I decided to use web fonts on the site, primarily just to try out some “hot, new technology”, but also because my lack of design skill means that any added bit of visual interest can’t hurt, right?  You’ll see three web fonts included as stylesheets, if you care to browse the source.  The fonts I chose are from Google’s Web Fonts, here: http://www.google.com/webfonts

Header Background: The header background image at the time of this writing was taken by me during afternoon tea at the Fairmont Hamilton Princess in Hamilton, Bermuda.  Try the rum Bloody Mary, it’s awesome.

Advertising: I’m sticking with Google AdWords, but created two new ad sizes and themed them to match the site’s color palette.  That was quick and easy to accomplish.

WordPress 3: I’ve been very happy with the ease of administration in WordPress 3 – particularly as someone who doesn’t post all that frequently.  The biggest upgrade, by far, has been the automated upgrade process that makes patching WordPress simple.  Version 2 of WordPress was a pain to upgrade and led to countless sites getting hacked because they were out-of-date on patches.   Now, if your site is out-of-date, you have no one to blame but yourself.  Log in and click the upgrade button once in a while!

I have an overall love/hate relationship with WordPress.  As a publisher, the tool is simple and straightforward to use.  As a developer, I tend to think it’s poorly documented and more complex than it needs to be – particularly the whole “loop” concept and the sheer volume of functions in the API.  I work with a lot of Web Content Management systems and feel like some of the enterprise systems that are extremely feature-rich are easier to develop with than WordPress.  Drupal is also easier, if you’re looking for another open source alternative.

Development Tools: I use Coda & TextMate for Mac, FogBugz for Issue Tracking, Kiln for Source Control.  The latter two are definitely overkill, but I use them for other projects so I might as well keep things consistent!

It has probably been 4 years, or so, since the last visual update to my site and I think it’s long past due.  I hope you find the new site more appealing, as I do!