New look, new engine
It’s been a while in coming, but I finally converted johnaugust.com over from Movable Type to WordPress, and redesigned a few things along the way. Well, okay; I redesigned pretty much everything. For people who are used to the old tabs-across-the-top layout, it may take a little while to get used to, but trust me, everything people actually used at the old site is now here, or will be shortly.
A few helpful hints on the new structure:
- Clicking anywhere on the header, or the big brass brad, will always take you back to the front page.
- Try the Archives. It creates a list of all entries, sorted by date, name or category. Very useful.
- The search now actually works. It will pull up full entries, combining them into pages of up to seven items.
- Instead of distinct sections for “Projects,” “Resources,” and “First Person,” these articles will be folded into the main content. If you want to see just the Projects, click on the button in the “Show by Category” section.
- Depending on how hard I get hit with comment spam, I may decide to turn on comment moderation. If so, comments on articles won’t show up until I approve them. I’ll warn you if I have to do this.
The old site was held together with duct tape and prayer, so the switch was necessary if a bit painful. Most things should be working now, but expect a few broken links and missing images. There’s a customized 404 page (”Sorry, I couldn’t find that.”). If you come across it while going through the site, I’d appreciate a note (you can leave a comment on this post) letting me know what took you there.
Articles
September 7th, 2004 at 4:19 pm
Great job. You are very dedicated to stuff in your life. Writing and this site. I’m sure there’s more to your life then this site and writing :).
I like the new layout a lot. Its all much more easier to access. For a second there I thought I was at the wrong site.
Oh and when you go to leave a comment. A small little box doesn’t pop up anymore.
“Ooompa-Loompas created this page in 0.192 seconds”. Interesting, they seem to be able to do anything.
September 7th, 2004 at 4:39 pm
The comment pop-up box was part of the comment spam problem. The evil spambots would look for it and use it to send bogus comments on old posts. The new version is less slick but safer.
September 7th, 2004 at 4:44 pm
Wow. I’m VERY impressed. Really nice design. Now if I can just get a FireFox RSS reader.
September 7th, 2004 at 4:59 pm
“The comment pop-up box was part of the comment spam problem. The evil spambots would look for it and use it to send bogus comments on old posts. The new version is less slick but safer.”
When I saw that I had made a double-post. I was a little bit ‘up the wall’. You had just been talking about spam and I’m pretty sure that double-posts fit in the category of spam.
Just my luck, I came here only minutes after the site was updated which is unusual (only get enough time to jump on the set for two hours a day, in the morning). Just been searching around the new site. Very impressed by it all John. You’re only one man.
Oh and thanks for deleting the other post.
September 7th, 2004 at 5:57 pm
The new site looks GREAT! It’s clean, easy to read and it’s got a brass brad in the corner. Excellent work John!
Good luck with the spam blocking - I noticed some pretty odd comments on the site last time I visited, so I can only imagine what your e-mail must look like. And let us know what you think of WordPress, too!
-DC
September 7th, 2004 at 10:50 pm
FYI: Comment Links
I don’t know if it was your intention or not, but the Recent Comments links (located on the home page side bar) transfer visitors to the very bottom of each article thread (below the comment text), while the comment links following the articles on the home page transfer visitors to the first comment in the thread.
-DC
September 8th, 2004 at 8:23 am
DC,
The comment links from the home page are supposed to transfer you to the most recent comment in the thread, so, the bottom. But it seems like on some browsers, it puts you down too far, so I may change this. Thanks for the heads-up.
September 8th, 2004 at 9:50 am
That makes a lot of sense. I’ve never used WordPress, but there may be a way for you to assign a PHP variable anchor linking to the most recent comment in each thread. I‚Äôm working on a similar project right now and I‚Äôll let you know if I discover anything.
-DC
September 12th, 2004 at 1:42 pm
is word press working out OK for ya? I was thinking of moving my site from using blogger to movable type but this word press seems pretty good too!!
-dan detroit,mi
September 13th, 2004 at 7:37 am
Wordpress is working out really well, but I can’t wholeheartedly recommend it to all comers. It’s very easy to install — much more so than Movable Type. But customizing it is trickier.
Unlike MT, where you’re dropping little tags (such as $MTEntryAuthor for the author of a post) into each template, every WP template is really a separate PHP file. PHP is a programming language, and while it’s pretty straightforward, doing some simple things takes a bit more work. For instance, this is how you pull up the author of an entry:
[php tags surrounding, and then] the_author()
As you can see, it’s really a function, and sometimes you need to pass arguments to it, and you need to make sure they’re formatted properly. Etc.
The other thing which took getting used to was that WP uses one index.php template for the whole site. So if you want different items (menus, comments, etc) on individual entries versus the front page, you have to find ways to “turn off” the stuff you don’t want to display. It’s not that hard, but it’s easier in MT, which uses different templates for different purposes.
Ultimately, I was sort of forced to make the switch, because my ISP banned MT, claiming it used too much processor time. But a lot of WP’s features really are an improvement, and its ability to dynamically generate pages has been a huge bonus.
If you’re coming from Blogger, and don’t already have/need your own hosted website, you should definitely check out TypePad, which uses the MT engine and hosts the site for you for $4.95 a month.
September 18th, 2004 at 7:01 pm
right on.. well i’m just toying with the idea of changing to MT at the moment.. i have my own hosting ISP already.. actually i send so many people to my ISP that today they just bumped me from 1 gig to 2.5 gigs space for free. hehee.. sweet.. now i can put a bunch of quicktimes of old school projects online… i also record bands in detroit and make them mp3s for free so that will give me more space to give away (gotta share the love with other creatives ya know!) so if you need free mp3s for your ipod check out visualnoiz.com/multimedia
i notice you never answered the guys question on the other page about backing up files.. i answered before you did… did you think i said it all??? hehe. i’m a bit of a dork and i’ve been thru hard drive crashes before.. i learned at an early age.. SAVE EARLY. SAVE OFTEN..and now I know to keep important stuff off the main HDD.. technology can suck sometimes!!!
thanks for putting those PDFs of your stuff online.. you’ve got a great resource… i won’t have much time to write as i work in post in detroit and the autoshow is coming up.. but when i have some free time theres at least 2 scripts floating around in my head.. but i’m trying to learn the smoke editing system too.. so if you have any projects you need edited i can use a $200,000 system for free… i love your work and would love to help you out on your indie projects.. do you ever shoot your own stuff or do you just write?
December 16th, 2004 at 6:05 am
If I have my family history right you are Junior’s son I am one of August (Shorty) Homeyer boys. I think you have meet my brother Dale. I have a Tool & Die Company in Marthasville MO just north of Washington.
Herb Homeyer
January 28th, 2005 at 12:10 am
Hey! Well, largely based solely on your recommendation, I made the jump into WordPress… and you’re right, that was unbelievably easy to install! I didn’t even know where to start with MoveableType.
I’m still stuck with trying to figure out how to customize it, but I think it’ll work out. Much better than the static blah I called a “website” before, at any rate. Thanks for the suggestion!
June 12th, 2005 at 7:26 pm
Broken link:
http://johnaugust.com/archives/2003/theory-1
At the end of this article is a link to theory #2 that fails with 404.
cheers, Jaxon
June 12th, 2005 at 7:27 pm
Here’s another one:
Theory 2’s article links back to Theory 1, but doesn’t do it.. with satisfaction.
J