Ever since I started my non-university site, I've been meaning to create a nice DB-driven back-end to manage it all, perhaps with some bells and maybe even whistles. However, I never came round to doing so because, well, I'm not exactly fond of building interfaces and there was other stuff to do as well. It also seemed a bit silly to do all that work myself when there are other packages out there that do everything for you. So in the end I decided to follow in the herd down to wordpress.

It's … nice. Changing styles is easy and you can build your own page templates and text filters to customize everything. One of my worries was that it'd limit me in my post formatting, but I can do everything in HTML just like I always did … once I turned off the visual editor and removed the wpautop and wptexturize filters. Of course, one of the downsides of using someone else's system is that you have to learn how everything works. So at the moment everything's still pretty simplistic. I'm not entirely sure if the stuff I have can really be presented the way I want by wordpress, but I seem to get by so far. At least I'll be able to update a little easier now.

So, this is what my site looks like now. Yeah I know, bland site is bland, but at least it works. There's posts over here ↓ and a navbar over there →. You may notice that there are two links to ‘projects’ there – that's something wordpressy. It makes a division between ‘Posts’, basically journal items with timestamps, and ‘Pages’, which are standalone. Tonc would be an example of Pages. The projects page and documents would be part of that too. Updates on those items, however, would be announced as posts.

Oh, and yes, I have been a little revisionist in the post orders. The past month or so has been a sort of trial run for all this stuff so there are many posts all at once right now. We apologize for the inconvenience.