Home → Archives → October 2005 → Design Notes

Friday, October 7, 2005

Design Notes

Welcome to printmode. Here's a look back at the install, setup, and design of my revamped site.

Moving Type

Weblogging tools (CMS) have proliferated in the last few years. When I decided to look into starting a blog (again) the big choice was which tool should I use. I had used Blogger in the past for a class weblog, My first weblog (which is now long gone, thank FSM) was powered by MovableType, and opensourceCMS has a nice gallery of PHP/MySQL-based systems (including the increasingly popular WordPress).

I ended up choosing MovableType. This decision was based on it having the most familiar user interface and template system and I like the feature set provided by MT. Thanks to Liz Lawley, licensing was not an issue for me. Liz helped RIT acquire a MovableType site license. While this makes MT free for me to use, I would have most likely went with MT anyway and used the free personal edition.

She Wore a Perl Necklace

MovableType is powered by the Perl programming language. I'm not fluent in Perl, I've used it, but its not a language I spend a lot of time tinkering with. So when it comes to poking around deep under the hood, I'm pretty much lost. While most power users would consider this a downfall, I don't see this becoming a problem. I don't feel that there should be a need for me to understand the gory details of what the software is doing. I just want it to work. If a bug or odd behavior surfaces that cramps my (publishing) style, there's a great MT-community to find answers and support. As long as MT does its job and publishes well formed data, I can do any ancillary processing in PHP.

Markup

True angle bracket geeks argue the virtues of serving HTML or XHTML. I understand why the argument exists. I'm not one to join the debate. I chose to serve my pages in XHTML 1.0 Transitional. I really don't have an argument as to why, it just seemed right. A lot of people in the blogland and corporate world are safely using XHTML. What it comes down to is most users really don't care if its HTML or XHTML. Users just want to use the web. What matters more to me is that the markup is valid, semantic, and accessible.

Makeup

This site has style thanks to Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). I use CSS to add visual presentation to the content. I don't think you could even get away with saying that CSS the cool thing to do. It's now the year 2005, using CSS to add presentation to your data is the RIGHT thing to do. From my view, CSS adoption has come along way and will only get better as more applications properly support the language. I see CSS becoming even more important as web media and print media continue to collide and there's a need to have one document that can handle the viewing habits and requirements of the user. This will require content to be fully separated from presentation.

Design Resources

When building any web site, care should be taken to create a design (not just the pretty pixels, but also the architecture) that will best serve the intended audience. That should come as no surprise to anyone. I put in a lot of thought into making this site easy to use. I spent a lot of time reading various design & usability guides and looking at how other sites (corporations, archives, blogs) handled the task. Some of these include:

How Its Done

The content is managed by MovableType. I don't use the dynamic publishing features of MT, I prefer having static base pages and apply dynamic content as needed (Such as the content found on the 'sidebar). PHP is used to handle the dynamic page processing.

I installed a few MT plugins to provide desired functionality. These include: Amputator and ArchiveYear. The Amputator plugin rewrites ampersand characters as an HTML entity reference. The ArchiveYear plugin allows for the creation of yearly archives, something I would I thought MT could handle on its own. Over at Learningmovabletype.com there is a great tutorial on Yearly Archives and how to use the ArchiveYear plugin.

The URL structure was the most thought provoking process of the site design. I wanted URL's that made sense and were usable. If anyone ever tells you that users don't look at the URL or use it for navigation, they A: don't know what they're talking about and B: are lying. I found that marketing folks tend to prime culprits in this area.

Creating the URL structure in MT was easier then it has been past. Six Apart has done a good job of making default configurations fairly well designed. I remember when MT used article IDs as URIs. E.g. http://blogitlikeitshot.com/archive/00001.html I primarly kept the default MT Archive Mapping settings and went with the following URI structure:

  • Blog Root (AKA the blog homepage):http://printmode.net/blog/
  • Archive Index: http://printmode.net/blog/archives/
  • Individual Archives: http://printmode.net/blog/archives/yyyy/mm/dd/file.ext (I wanted to do with out the file extension, but my current host doesn't allow it when using PHP.
  • Daily Archives: http://printmode.net/blog/archives/yyyy/mm/dd/
  • Monthly Archives: http://printmode.net/blog/archives/yyyy/mm/
  • Yearly Archives: http://printmode.net/blog/archives/yyyy/
  • Category Archives Index: http://printmode.net/blog/archives/category/
  • Category Archives: http://printmode.net/blog/archives/category/category-name/

Building this website has been fun and was a great diversion from the loads of school work. Now I can only hope that providing worthwhile content will be just as fun.

Posted in:

No Comments Yet