Recreating this website was not one of my new year’s resolutions, but I can’t take it any longer. There are too many things wrong with this it. If you think what you see of the website sucks, you should see the horrible admin interface that I created for myself. Hardly anything is salvageable. Back in January, I started developing a new website from scratch.

Application

The current website is horribly architected and uses a ridiculously slow custom library for handling data access and validation. I’m going to be following a new design approach, but new website will still be written in PHP (5.3) with MySQL for the database, and it will still use the Zend Framework. I’ve toyed with using Doctrine ORM, but it seems like overkill for what I’m doing.

Interface

I’m actually going to be releasing the new website application before completing the redesign; however, there are going to be noticeable changes at that point.

There are too many good bookmarking applications around the ‘net to have one baked into this website, so the bookmarks section is going away.

Previously, the expectation was for musings to be multi-paragraph articles, worthy of dozens upon dozens of your thoughtful comments. I don’t have the time to write full-length articles, and I doubt that will change anytime soon, so the format is going to change. After the release, musings are going to follow a format more like John Gruber’s Daring Fireball. A musing might be a full-length article, but it could just be a link to a website with a single-sentence comment. This may decrease my Twitter traffic, but that probably wouldn’t be so bad…

And This Is Happening When?

Good question. I’m probably within ten hours of completing the application itself, which means it could be released sometime in late March or early April. The redesign? I wouldn’t count on seeing anything until July.