When I decided to make the switch to WordPress and redesign the site, I never thought it would be over a year before it was all said and done. Family life has kept me busy and side work has occupied a great deal of my free time. When it comes to designing my own sites, I always seem to think I can whip up a new layout in a month and be completely happy with it. Not only did that not happen, but I let my postings slip more and more until I started to wonder why I even have a website. I’ve always intended mckendall.net to be a creative outlet and not just some glorified link dump. Well, 2007 is almost gone, but I’ve got 2008 to make things up.
When determining what the new layout would look like, I knew I wanted something clean, something simple, and definitely something different. Clean and simple meant so many things, but to me it meant going with the basics: black and white. Also I felt those colors would tie in nicely with my photoblog. Along the way I discovered the concept of designing with a grid. That was just the direction I needed to get me started. Many months later and with some inspiration from the gurus of the grid (Mark Boulton, Khoi Vinh, Derek Punsalan, and Jeff Croft) I’ve come up with version 5 of mckendall.net.
I also decided to have the site hosted with the fabulous folks at DreamHost instead of running my own server. That was a huge relief. No more worries about spam filters, network outages, and server attacks.
I’ve also integrated some social networking apps. My movie links remain as is but now have a rating. Music links are pulled from Last.fm. Dailies will no longer be integrated into posts, they’ll now come from Del.icio.us. After a long debate on whether to continue using Coppermine or start using Gallery2 for photo management, I’ve decided to go with Flickr. It all came down to which was easier to integrate into my layout. I couldn’t find a decent Coppermine plugin for WordPress. WPG2, Gallery2′s WordPress plugin, was too bloated for what I wanted. Flickr was easy to setup, backfill, and most importantly allowed me to format the thumbnails as I pleased.
It’s been a long and somewhat rewarding process. I always seem to be so critical of my own work. Even looking at version 5 today I feel there may be some things that will need to be tweaked in the near future. I’ll just need to run with it for while and let things play out.
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