Recently in Tribolum matters Category

Put this together in 2 hours, really quick and dirty. Couldn’t stand the default Movabletype template.

So now I’ve got to work on incorporating this design into the individual posts.

I’m expecting the colour-scheme to change. Any ideas?

Every now and then this happens.

A new colour scheme catches my eye. Some new-fangled idea. Sometimes original, sometimes borrowed. Sometimes frankensteined.

But somehow every time I put together a redesign, I’m hesitant to mix in graphics, as if the addition of images would somehow mar a purely (or mostly) textual design. It’s an unnecessary constraint I place upon myself, but it’s a challenge to create compelling design without any images.

There are many elements I’ve yet to bring back into the site, not to designing mention the template for individual posts. As usual, you’ll have to bear with the construction that’s going on.

Thanks for sticking around.

Really, thanks.

Would like you readers to help me out a bit as I try to craft a new design for this blog.

What adjectives would you use to describe Tribolum?

It’s time to move things around. I’m currently using a wonderful template designed by Mena Trott.

Time to customise.

It’s Valentine’s Day. Didn’t realise it until a colleague gave our flowers to everyone in the department - an extremely sweet gesture.

Tribolum turned 8 yesterday. So much has changed since. Finished college, married Faith, begot Anne, awaiting Caleb / Ezra, moved out, became a civil servant (I still shudder at the thought).

To me the major theme of this portion of my life has been that of goodbyes. Maybe I was a fool to ever have held on to the notion that I’d never have to let go; that somehow the world would remain small enough to always be part of my life. The small village life does not exist in the city.

I haven’t spoken to my childhood best friend in years. Many people I grew up with have moved to all corners of the earth. Though just a phone call or an email away, the distance seems unbridgeable. It is not a physical distance or a chasm created only by time, but one forged by life. Life may not bring us to the same place.

People who read my blog 8 years ago have gone on to do other things. Most were young people interested to read about my long-distance relationship with Faith. Now that we’re married, that chapter is closed, and those readers too have moved on.

I guess I’m learning to enjoy the ride, and not worry whether the party I started out with rides the same sled. We’ll probably bump and meet some point down the slope. I can’t help wondering how everyone is though.

Pardon the dust. I’ve been having the itch to redesign for the longest time. This was pretty much put together in an hour.

Was it John Lennon who said “Life is what happens when you’re busy making plans”?

Anyway, Tribolum turns six today. There were thoughts of a redesign, a realignment, a re-something. Then there was no time, except for a short reminisce of these six glorious years.

Thanks for being here. Whoever you are.

Now that my Powerbook is officially dead, I have to work on the PC, which till now was only good for playing computer games like World of Warcraft. Using the PC. it feels like I’ve been hit with a -20 creativity, -15 productivity, -100 vibe curse.

This is the part 1 of the article of Tribolum’s redesign like I promised.

Backend: Movable Type

I believe that function should always take precedent over form. In the case of a blog, content and interactivity should be paramount. I chose Movable Type (MT) for the sole reason it is the CMS I am most comfortable with: I am familiar with most of the available plugins and have seen great examples of sites which use MT. I’ve used MT to run bookstores and run meeting schedules.

Other CMSes that are popular are WordPress, TextPattern and Drupal.

Plugins

Much as I love MT, JKottke is right when he implied that MT has stagnated. In the immortal words of The Lord of the Rings, “somethings which should not have been forgotten, were”.

So for some of the basic functions you see around here, I had to turn to the Plugin community.

• Acronym. This plugin automatically adds <acronym> tags by bouncing stuff in caps off a flatfile database. This way, I can talk about CSS and XHTML all I want.
• CatEntries. I stumbled upon this very useful plugin on one of my projects where I had to display all categories except one or two. On Tribolum the Asides column on the right sidebar is generated on the same blog as the main content, but I wanted them to display there and not here. I didn’t want to create a separate blog because my attention span is so short that interesting links seem less interesting when I have to click my mouse a few extra times to share them. The less compelling reason would be that I believed that putting them on the same blog would give me the flexibility to combine the Asides list with the main content (like in Jason Kottke’s) should I ever feel the inclination to.
• SpamLookup. I used to get comment and trackback spam by the thousands daily. Jay Allen’s Blacklist worked briefly for me, but somewhere my incompetence showed when I couldn’t reinstall it after I switched hosts. Brad Choate’s SpamLookup is everything MT’s comment management should be (are you hearing this SixApart?). It doesn’t catch all comment spam, but it does a pretty decent job. And mass deleting is now a breeze.
• Smartypants When are inverted commas (which you Americans call “curly quotes”) “inverted commas”? How do you get them to curl inward when you only have one key on your keyboard for both characters? John Gruber saves the day with Smartypants. Get your quotes right.

Are there any other plugins that you’ve found useful for your blog?

Next part: Coding.

I need an email form with some semblance of spam protection. Any suggestions?

Things are shaping up pretty nicely. I’ve tested the design on a few browsers. Seems to look fine on Camino, Safari, Firefox and IE6 Windows and IE5.2 Mac.

I’ve also respecified a 780px width, so it should cater to the 800 x 600 crowd. I’ll document this haphazard redesign a little more elaborately.

Must sleep now.

MovableType decides to flip out on me, choosing not process seemingly random MT-tags while working others just fine. There probably is method to the madness, but I have a one-month-old waiting to be fed.

I initially had a redesign put up for a few hours yesterday, but decided against it. I had wanted to use the typographical style of a new Bible Faith’s friend bought her for the blog, complete with leather-cover and gold-leafed page-edges.

Somehow it felt sacriligeous. Or not. I couldn’t make up my mind. It’s a feat indeed when someone’s idea of book design has become synonymous with the Bible.

Rudimentary implementation of last-minute inspiration. Lots more to come.

As faithful readers have experienced on numerous occassions, Tribolum will be undergoing a live reconstruction. This does mean things will not look as pretty, but changes will be made in real time.

I know that while professionally this is never done, I embark on every redesign of Tribolum with a vague idea of where it will lead me.

Cross your fingers.

Spam Lookup, by Choate. Hopefully after installing this, the word “spam” will come to mean the tinned meat, and the constant barrage I’ve been hammered with will be a memory.

Ok, after numerous attempts to install MT-Blacklist and not succeeding, I’m going to give it up for tonight. Comment spam is flooding through the blog door and window sill even as I type.

I keep getting a “cannot open schema file” when I try to run mt-bl-load.cgi. Nothing beats the tedious task of having to sift through tons of comment spam every day, but this installation is coming a little too close it for comfort.

So I bit the bullet and propagated the domain name. There are things yet to be moved, but everything is archived and should be restored. A redesign is due, but I’m just glad that I am able to update again.

Will write. Will take photos. Will post them. Will breathe again.