I’ve just finished a website for Richard Griffin, a journalist who has been writing columns for many years. He wanted a website to list and archive his writings, and so I’ve created http://richardbgriffin.com for him. It features articles, blog, links, and a few static pages.
It was actually interesting to create the site – he has nearly a thousand articles from the last decade (and more from before that aren’t web-published). The last decade is when my most vivid memories have developed, so it was a sort of blast-from-the-past as I processed articles about Pope John Paul II, Bush’s presidential wins, 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and the 2008 presidential election.
I don’t agree with everything or even anything that my clients want on their websites, but it’s still an interesting read. Check it out if you have the time – there’s lots of articles about aging and spirituality.
After finishing a redesign of the website, I decided to transfer my theme to a Joomla! CMS so that other people could easily make changes to the site content. This basically required a reimplementation of everything I had done already. But it also allowed me to take advantage of more advanced components, modules, and plugins that have been designed for Joomla! I unveil it to the senior class committee on Thursday – I hope it find and fix any last remaining bugs before then!
I’ve been working on the Harvard senior class website for a few days now, not doing much else besides eating and sleeping. It’s not that websites are terribly difficult to build – writing up a clean CSS is rather easy, once the quirks of Internet Explorer browser compatibility are worked out.
The design, however, is the hard part. Coming up with a sleek, novel design requires a lot of time for me, and I know that I’ve spent hours moving a couple lines around, trying to make the page look good. I spent a lot of time last night making a new theme that I’ve decided not to use. Good learning experience? Perhaps. Waste of time? Sure feels like it.
I went back to my third design for the site, and it’s in my Projects page. I still feel that it’s a little bit off, but I’m not sure what to do. I think I’ll let it stay as is. After all, content is more important than beauty, right?
This is my first new post on my hosted wordpress blog. My website is now entirely hosted by dreamhost, including the blog, which was previously a free-hosted wordpress.com blog. The transfer process was pretty simple, and the theme integration was straightforward, since this is the second time I am doing it.
Overall, a success!
Post/View Comments
Subscribe - RSS Feed
Claire Suddath’s 25 Things (Time Magazine)
Claire Suddath’s article on 25 Things I Didn’t Want to Know About You, as I mentioned in a previous post, was satirizing the ridiculousness of the 25 Things Facebook trend. Rather than driving sense into people and the trend into oblivion, Suddath most likely raised its profile – indeed, someone actually found my blog from a Google search for “claire suddath 25.
It reminds me of the time a hostage’s life was being determined based on the amount of website traffic. I forget the exact details, or whether the story was even true, but the victim’s survival basically depended on people not visiting a certain website.
What happens next? Of course, the story is all over the TV and popular news channels. Poor guy, I hope it was a false story. Shame on you, journalists who report on something bad only to raise your own profiles!