In Which the Site is Redesigned .:. kentbrewster.com

Brewster's Law of Developer Psychoanalytics: if you want to find out exactly how screwed up in the head a front-end engineer is, have him write a content management system and analyze the resulting user experience. You'll see. (Oh, yes ... you will see....)

Some home-grown CMSs are punishingly anal. Others are incomprehensibly random. All, however, are weird little rat's-nests of code, built with insufficient product requirements, patched only under circumstances of extreme duress, and prone to break at the Exact Wrong Time.

After suffering through the vicissitudes of my very own hand-whittled CMS for way too long, I'm pleased to unveil the new and improved Brewster's Field Guide to Web 2.666, code-named "Lelijk maar Snel," which is Dutch for "Ugly but Fast." I'm doing my best to bring all the old posts, content, and comments over, and have added something new. Here and there you'll spot a closed norgie next to a purplish headline, indicating that there's something behind the curtain that you might or might not want to see. In this case, it's the nerdish details of how the new site works. (Or, in the words of the folk singer: "I've suffered for my art; now it's your turn.")

The Nerdish Details

• Basic principles: each page on the site should consist of structure, presentation, and behavior layers, with a single CSS link in the HEAD and a single script tag at the bottom of the BODY. In my case I'm getting a little bit obsessive-compulsive about things, and have rigged it so all my JS and CSS shows up inline, rather than coming in on separate HTTP calls. (Take that, YSlow!) Other scripts and styles might pop up occasionally, especially when I'm showing an example.
• I'm using a heavily modified version of the Yahoo User Interface library's Grids, Fonts, and Reset stylesheets. Most of the mods were to Grids, which had no way of doing a 15% column. I've renamed some of the class names so they made more sense to me (content-unit and content-wrapper, instead of yui-u and yui-gg). I've also added a decorative wrapper around the main bd division and fiddled with some margins, to show a right-height vertical line between content and navigation.
• As already noted, I'm hiding some content using the methods described in Toggling Element Visibility. I'm a wordy little so-and-so; hopefully this will allow only marginally-interested readers to get all the main points of what I'm trying to say before giving up in disgust.

So: it's looking less like a blog and more like a collection of quasi-random pages and projects, which is what it always was. I've also added a chunk of my fiction, celebrating the ten-year anniversary of my last professional sale. Someday When I Have Time™, I will get back at it. Also on the site is a set of Frequently Asked Questions and a contact form, but please keep in mind that the best way to reach me is to leave a comment in public, somewhere on the site.

Post a Comment

brandon .:. 20071120091118

thanks for the recommend on TestDisk and PhotoRec, It's trying to find some very important something about her master's degree for my g/f right now. I hope it works. Data Rescue II's free trial just lets you recover one file and the all have names like doc09 and doc14, I picked the wrong deleted file for my one free recovery and then found your page. I like the setup and I love the norgies. Really great. I wish I had norgies on my Expression Engine page, I had to enable your site in scriptblocker but you seem non-malicious. I just hope the file recovery goes well.