So I’m in the middle of building these templates that five sites will use, and I’m starting from scratch, or was. A few months back in a couple days I built this same sight, well 4 pages of this same sight and did that from scratch. I have to admit though I hacked up a storm to get that out so quick and it only worked in IE 7. For my purposes it was great work done faster than could be expected. But for production, I think not.
So I decided today that YUI Base, Reset, and Grids are going to be included in the templates.
One concern about using the grids is that the grids are mostly fixed width, well for my purposes that’s fantastic since I’m creating this site off of it’s current tables based design. The move to CSS is a HUGE step in the right direction. I’ll keep working on a layout that works fluidly for another phase.
The new Stars album In Our Bedroom After the War is quite good. By-the-bye they are playing in Atlanta on Oct 27th. Maybe I’ll see you there.
Today I spent a lot of time trying to configure the new (dv) base server. I must say changing Linux environments like this throws off my command line flow. It only took me a few hours to get yum installed. Couldn’t get bzr installed at all. I did get Subversion installed, but didn’t actually do anything with it. I still need to figure out if upgrading Python to v2.4 will take me out of the UOP.
David Seah has a great article on how to configure the (dv) for WordPress, and I’m gonna use it as a guide post for configuring this (dv) for ExpressionEngine. Thanks Dave!
To-do
- Python 2.4
- Kill SMPT connections
- Configure MySQL
- Configure PHP
- Learn more about yum
- GET MY CAR FIXED!
I have a conference call with China on my Thursday morning. Need to practice some phrases…
Today I am writing my first Expression Engine Template. So far I can tell it’s not that bad once you get used to it. It is semi-frustrating to feel like people make things more complicated than they need to by using template systems. But I am really in no position to evaluate it’s effectiveness yet.
So launch is um, we don’t know when. The goal is though to have the entire site re-written in a WCM ((Web Content Manager)) of some or other type. Hence the Expression Engine template.
In other things Elliot helped me configure postfix for the first time. That was pretty easy. I’ve also done a few mysqldump’s and imports. It feels really good to be able to dump a site and then import it on another server and actually have it appear magically. I feel like I’ve been missing out by being too lazy to learn.
Elliot also showed my this amazing commenting setup. I really like the way it looks on the Django Book site. ((I linked to a page where you could see it.)) So that makes me really wish I was smarter. That JS stuff seems pretty light weight. I could be wrong. That is really slick stuff regardless. I’m so impressed it loads about 50 million times faster than a lightbox and is way more useful. I wonder if there is a way to cache every light box image on a page in the background so that it loads faster. That makes me wish I was smarter also. I might be able to figure it out.
Back to the template…
