Tread lightly on the things of earth

Relaunch!

It’s been eight months since the last redesign, and Textpattern has now stabilized as a high-quality publishing platform, so it’s time.

This relaunch has taken me an extra long time because, true to character, I keep venturing down tangential learning paths. But this time reasonably so, I like to think, because I’m learning to corral my chaotic development approach into a structured one that can

1. safely backtrack to solid ground as needed, thereby eliminating my biggest bugaboo: allowing my inquisitive “What if?” experiments to obliterate already-working solutions

2. be applied across the development of many sites, with equally consistent results (I always prize replicability)

This steep-yet-joyful learning curve started during the process of assembling my friend Hal’s site several weeks ago and has lasted every moment through now in refurbishing my own.

Man, I love learning new tools! —

• Textpattern, the now-released GPL‘d CMS whose elegance and community motivates me to learn stuff, try stuff

• MAMP for making Apache + MySQL + PHP development on Mac OS X click on/click off easy

• Subversion for ensuring I never again overwrite a good idea or force back to front-center an already-solved problem

• SVK for, in effect, using Subversion in offline mode (PowerBook, anywhere, any time)

Because Textpattern stores nearly everything in the database — content, templates, includes, stylesheets — instead of on the filesystem, I’ve gotten a lot clearer on how to edit and version-track in-database data. Two tools/techniques emerge as extraordinarily useful for this:

• Scott’s Link Template 2 File scripts, which dump Textpattern’s in-database XHTML chunks to disk for easier editing and version tracking, and then reload that dumped data cleanly back into the database (thanks, Scott)

• Code to transfer database tables between local and remote MySQL servers over a ssh tunnel (I, uh, hadn’t realized this was even possible)

Today I’ve done battle with my perfectionism (a flipside of “love of learning,” at least for me) and I’ve won: Today I release this site to production. Woo-hoo!

(And I capture its state safely in a Subversion repository, of course. ;-)

Welcome to this refreshed presentation of my 2002–present content. I invite you to explore my thoughts herein, some of them reverie and some of them, admittedly, bombast. All are a record of my struggle to understand, to comprehend what it means to be whole.

Remaining known issues:

• masthead text formatting is askew in IE/Windows

•