OK, so LeeNutter.com is now xavoy.com. Why? A few reasons really. Funnily enough one of the reasons is because I hate the email address my name at my name dot com. Of course, I could have used email at my name dot com or something equally as unimaginative, but that still didn’t fit right.
Seriously though, this has been a long time coming. I had been thinking about another online alias for a while now but of course domain availability prevented me from committing. I like the name xavoy, it looks great when written / typed which was important to me. It’s pronounced ‘savoy’ like the cabbage, although the name has nothing to do with the vegetable, nor the area in France. In fact, it means very little to anybody except for me, which is great!
Whilst looking for other identities, I’d actually taken up a couple, started blogs and played with how it might feel to use that identity for a while. I hated them all. I’d played with xavoy before committing too, and I loved it.
Aside from the name change, I’ve also redesigned, which you may or may not have noticed or care for. I also played with a few different content management systems, everything from another self written one all the way through to a hosted system.
The hosted system I played with was tumblr, which suited for a few days as I was able to post just about anything I came across and found interesting. This was useful because it helped me remember the cool stuff I’d stumbled across online, but I quickly realized that it wouldn’t do anything for anyone. Whilst people would find some of the things interesting, there was no obvious link between them and people would quickly get bored with all the crud between what they considered interesting posts.
There was a link of course, but nothing recognizable to anyone but me, again. I recognize the uselessness of a blog about nothing in particulr, plus I figured I could bookmark these things using delicious. This way I could find them again if I needed them and wouldn’t bore anyone else shitless.
But I could have used tumblr as a regular blog, so why didn’t I? A few reasons really. First up, I couldn’t figure out how to get it working without a sub domain. Meaning at the very least I had to have www.xavoy.com, which is not what I wanted. On top of that, I couldn’t figure out how to get static pages happening, despite having seen it on other tumblr blogs, the templating system didn’t fit well with me and I couldn’t get my baselines to line up when I posted random sized images or embedded random videos.
It wasn’t all bad though, the idea of not having to maintain a CMS really sat sat well with me. What a great concept? I can rattle on about all sorts in my posts and not have to worry about the complicated PHP code like I have done for years. If I want a new feature and there isn’t a module or plugin then tough shit.
Turns out though that the shortcomings of tumblr made it impossible for me to stick with, so I went out again looking to design my own CMS. This soon got tedious, I’ve progressed considerably since the last time I sat down and wrote a CMS from scratch so the old LeeNutter.com system was useless to me, I had to start again. This didn’t really work with my current schedule and concentration span, so I looked again for a decent and appropriate pre-written CMS.
I’d played with Textpattern on other sites and quite enjoyed it, so that was my first port of call, and it turns out my last. I did look back at Wordpress but it’s a huge piece of junk. I mean, it’s fantastic and full of features, but in terms of the code it’s colossal and unorganized, hideous really. I can deal with running someone elses code on my server but not if it’s as disturbing as that.
It would have been nice to use markdown, but it turns out textile is actually even beter and it didn’t take long to convert my old posts anyhow. I actually really like the way Textpattern works and I’d recommend it to anyone who’s running a fairly simple site and needs complete control.
After saying that though, I’ve got plans for a reasonably complicated forum based site and there’s no way in hell I’ll be able to use Textpattern. It’s not the be all and end all but it’s a fantastic CMS for a basic web site and I wouldn’t wish the alternatives on even my worst enemies.
So, here we are. I’ve probably lost all my page rank because of the duplicate content I’ve pushed onto the several blogs I tested. I’ve probably lost all my readers because I’m too busy wasting my time on other fruitless projects right now, but what the hell. We are here, and I’m looking forward to playing.
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OK, so that’s how we got here from there. I apologize for the incredibly useless thought stream style post but I needed to get it out of my notepad before I hit the end and lost it forever. At least the post was timely, I’d been threatening to take the time to move over to xavoy.com for a while now and at last, we’re finally here.
If you’re still listening and would care for more rambles such as this, amongst some more sensical and useful pieces, please make sure you update your feed subscriptions to http://feeds.feedburner.com/xavoy
“How easy it is in our life, to miss what’s being offered.” — Paul Haller