It’s time.

I’ve grown tired of my site. It’s like a well-worn t-shirt at this point, but one that was never that comfortable to begin with. Having launched version 4.0 interim of this site back in, gosh, I’m guessing 1999, I think it has served its purpose.

The site never looked the way that I wanted it to look. I was going for a clean, minimalist approach, with a hat tip to nature. I wanted photos of trees, mountains, fake animals. I wanted it to look like a clean white room with a tree sawed in half length-wise as a bench, and a stainless steel coffee table without ornamentation in the middle of the floor, and with a giant picture window looking out over the city and straight at the mountains across the way. But I never got there. I was tempted by too many bells and whistles and never kept myself focused on the plan. So it’s going out the window. Mostly.

In traditional halfass style, I will be doing the redesign with only a vague plan and live, with no pre-concepted mock-ups, no preproduction environments, and only a meager tool set at my disposal. Don’t expect greatness.

I won’t be migrating the software that runs this site to any newfangled thing. While I’d like to hold out for the shareware content management systems being cobbled together over at Textism or, even cooler, the Semantic Web hoo-ha recently announced by my newly-crowned web design and literary idol Mr. Paul Ford at Ftrain. I will stick with Movable Type.

Movable Type is a great product, for which I have paid a license fee and which does the job more splendidly than any tools I’ve utilized on this site in the past. But it has issues. The way it handles categories is clumsy at best, and the fact that a new version hasn’t come out in a very long time is a bit troubling. Additionally, the software has the major downside of forcing the user into the “weblog” metaphors and navigations. Well, of course, you say. It is weblogging software. True enough. But it doesn’t quite do what I’d like it to do. I could cobble something together, assuming my skills and patience were up to the task, but I won’t. I could do hours upon hours of template surgery, which might improve things a bit, and I could install the myriad plug-ins and hacks. But I don’t want to do that either. So I’ll live with what I have. I would love to use Movable Type Pro if it ever comes out and if the feature set matches my requirements. If it’s anything like TypePad, which I beta tested, it will be extra deluxe. So I’ll wait for that.

Since I’m waiting for this, that, or for whatever else comes along, I think it will be important for me to mark up my pages simply, maybe even somewhat semantically, and I should most certainly adhere to the latest standard practices for dividing my code from my content. This will make migrating to a new software system or version more painless in the future. But will my tools support it? For instance, is MT going to give me br / instead of
? I guess it’s not too much of a big deal if it doesn’t. I know that sites which are updated frequently tend to lose their “validator” status.

I won’t have any fancy stuff going on, and I won’t be planning anything out too much ahead of time. But I am willing to put a little bit of thought into this. The first step is to make a list of what I Do and DON’T like about this site right nowm, as well as to state my general objectives. Please feel free to add additional suggestions in the comments of this post, if you are so inclined. The “don’t” list.

• I don’t like pop-up windows for comments. TypePad’s default templates, and many sites I’ve noticed during my countless hours of surfing, eschew this. So shall I.
• I don’t like how busy the site has become. I should have learned long ago to not try to do too much. Who cares what I’m currently listening to? What’s the purpose of having my “People” links along the side? Can’t I just have a “links” page? My blog page should not be a portal. Gak! I said portal.
• Don’t break the links in redesign. This requires sticking with the .shtml file extension and eschewing PHP OR some Apache rewriting rules.
• Fix the navigation. Why I have stuff in some places and not in others, and why I feel it necessary to break out a new section every few months is beyond me. I must strive to contain myself in this release.
• That being said, it is going to be difficult to wrangle all this content (something like 1000 entries of complete and utter crap) into a usable, clean and coherent design.
• I’ve yet to determine the navigation that suits the site best. I know a two column layout, with certain links on one side and content on another, is best. Since I won’t be doing ads (what marketeer in their right mind would associate with something titled “halfass?”), I don’t need a 3rd column. But what are my “sections?” Given that I decide what sections I need, how should I navigate them? And beyond that, I’d like these types of URLs (/about/) instead of these (/about_halfass.shtml)
• I’m going to design live. My first step will be to strip out all formatting from my MT templates and arrange the content logically on the page without worrying about where it will be displayed. This will be only the second time I’ve tried to do a site using this technique that many call “semantic markup.” We’ll see how long I stick with it.
• As to what to do with the front page, I haven’t a clue. I was considering moving the weblog to the front, but this is sounds increasingly difficult given the “don’t break links” rule. I could put a redirect in at the / level to /log/, but that is so crufty it makes me want to change the name of the site to “even less than halfass.”
• I have figured out that my content is primarily the following: 1) the weblog, 2) the photos, 3) the “about” page, 4) the “links” page. I migrated the former “features” section into the weblog. Sure, they are buried and jumbled in there, but maintaining several different blogs, CMS systems, etc. grew to be too time-consuming and, quite frankly, a pain in my ass. The photos section will be excluded from this initial redesign phase. That is going to require its own thinking and software, I fear. But I will be keeping Mosaics, which I think are one of the best ways to share snapshots on a personal website: efficient and provides a wonderful, visual “slice of life.”
• a photo at the top of the page. That’s what I’ve wanted from day one. And hopefully randomly-rotating. Maybe Hivelogic’s PHP thingy?

• I tried to go for a more collaborative weblog, but it turns out that most people I know are far too busy leading fruitful and “meat space” worlds to post frequently to this site. I’m not getting rid of contributing bloggers, but I’m going to change the whole site to being all about me, my wife, my friends, my family, and whatever we are thinking and up to. The site is not going to be the home of all the record labels, media conglomerates, review sites, etc. etc. etc. that I always plant in my mind, begin to grow on the site, and then quickly allow to shrivel and die on the vine through neglect.

So why do I get to call the upcoming Halfass version 5 if I’m not actually changing the internal works at all? Because it’s going to look so radically different, everybody is going to think that I did something major. In fact, it will just be some template changes and a new style sheet.

What won’t be achieved in this version? Well, this site won’t become any better. No matter how I mark up my content, it will still be generated from my completely fizzled brain. I can’t, through code, create a dense, lucid, intelligent, literary and entertaining experience for my tens of readers. But I can try to make it as pretty as possible for someone of my limited design sensibilities and even more limited command of the graphic arts. But it’s all for fun.

Halfass has been hanging out on the web almost continuously since 1995. I hope that with the new version, I’ll set it up so the site can continue to play with y’all for a few more years and not have to be called in for dinner or bedtime before all the fun is over.