There’s no denying the fact that this site has gotten little to no love for quite some time. My words and code sat around, slowly rotting away on the file server. For someone who makes his living building web sites, that’s truly anti-bueno.
The new duds (currently under development)
What you see pictured above is my grand attempt to rectify that situation. The future 8th incarnation of Fischler.org has been responsible for many a sleepless, caffeine-fueled night, and will be an ongoing distraction of substantial proportions until the day I get it out the door.
Looks sweet. So why isn’t it done yet?
If all I was worried about updating was the look of the site, I can guarantee you’d already be staring at the living, breathing code, and I would have easily kept to that insane two week launch schedule I twittered about almost two months ago. But that picture doesn’t begin to tell how big of a rewrite this is. This is by and far the largest re-imaging of this site since it was officially launched back in August of ‘99.
The project has grown in scale exponentially, and there are a handful of reasons why. Topping the list would be my desire to cram over 3 years worth of knowledge I gained at Lime (including those things I only read about or heard others talk about while there) into a singular jewel I could be proud of– a summation of my true skill level. Then there’s the fact that for every time I manage to implement one new feature, I’d stumble across two other features in my research that I’d just have to include on the “to-do” list.
Usually I’d be far more stingy in deciding how much time and what part of the project I’d spend my energy on, but while I wasn’t really a fan of the way I got all this “free time” to work on my own projects, it’s a luxury I’ve tried to make good use of. I’d have to say it was a contributing factor as well.
Putting best practices to practice
Once I realized what was happening, I started taking steps to bring the project back into focus. All my code has been put under source control (Subversion, if you’re curious), which has saved my ass a few times with coding blunders and has made it super easy to port my work between my laptop and my desktop. There’s also the use of a CSS framework (Blueprint) to reset default browser styles and and help out with layout out the content.
I'm actually *gasp* planning things out!
On the project management side of things, I’ve even started pinning task cards to my itsy-bitsy cork board (ala the agile project management school of thought) and crafting some paper prototypes to help me play with feature and layout work. These are the very places where my previous redesigns have bottlenecked and either slowed down or outright killed work in progress.
C’mon, this is just the same ol’ song and dance, right?
Not a chance, though I wouldn’t doubt the thoughts considering the number of false starts I’ve crowed about in the past. This isn’t one of those “just talk” sessions. The last two months have been like folding the timeline and jumping back to 1997, when I was teaching myself the core skills I’d wind up making my career out of. I’m heading into my 10th year as a professional, and I’ll be damned if I let this place reflect poorly of me any longer.
With no absolute deadline, the goal until now has been to get as much of the “new and improved” into this site as possible. The beast has swelled, but very soon a line in the sand will be drawn and I shall tame said beast into a properly stable release. After that, the plan is to iterate the hell out of it — rolling out little tweaks and features as I create them.
Really, It’d be a shame if I put all that effort and energy into a redesign and had nothing to show for it…again.
