Making the change, part 1

You may not realize it, but you are looking at an almost complete re-write of this site. Aside from the main page and the template, quite literally all of the back end has been replaced.

When Awesomenessinabox.com was first launched (back then it was CaerPlatypus.com), I was operating on a very limited time budget. The site was part of a portfolio package I was putting together for Nanaonsha ltd. in hopes of obtaining employment with them. At the time I weighed the option of researching and choosing a CM system against just hacking some tables together quickly in a database, and as I had no idea how much time was involved in the former I ended up just slopping some simple tables into a database and populating them manually with data. This got the job done, but it was incredibly ugly from a maintenance point of view and had no support whatsoever for keeping a running blog. Every image I uploaded to a gallery required me to create a thumbnail myself and upload the image and it’s thumbnail into specific folders on my server via ftp. After doing so, I had to get a connection to my database and add a row to the appropriate table with a primary key that matched the filename of the image and thumbnail exactly.

Later, after deciding on WordPress as my CM system of choice for this site, I simply hacked the existing site into my WordPress install in an arrangement that would terrify even Mary Shelly. All of the existing pages were grafted into a custom template and left exactly as they were. Needless to say, while it didn’t take much time it didn’t alleviate any of the existing maintenance problems either.

And so I’ve been spending a little time over the past few weeks working on getting the site in order. All of my custom code on the backend has been removed in favor of the NextGen Gallery and Contact Form II plugins, and a few WordPress pages. I can now upload images to any gallery and add them to a blog post automatically, which is a huge time saver. Because of this, you should start seeing more work from my sketchbook from now on.

Part two of “Making the change” should appear in the next few days. Now that the backend has been switched over I’m going to finish the new frontend. The current visual design of the site, while not terrible, is rather too gray and bleak for my tastes.