found drama

Earlier today we embarked on a little upgrade here at F_D. We ditched our old Kubrick bastardization (nee “Mario”) and upgraded the front-end to use the next-gen, deliciously AJAX-y K2 framework. From there, we installed a slew of supporting plug-ins and tweaked the look-and-feel until we had achieved an approximation of our wireframe from yesterday. We have dubbed this skin “Pemulis”. (Bonus points if you know where that comes from.)

So what’s the pay-off?

• Improved sidebar. From the admin side, it’s more easily maintainable/customizable through the SBM plug-in. On the user/front-end of things: better search, better highlighting of recent content, and more.
• More compatible styles. The del.icio.us link dumps should look right on the first hit now (for example). A wider content region gives us a little more wiggle room, too.
• Better tagging. We discovered Ultimate Tag Warrior (nice) which happens to be compatible with my old/existing tagging from SimpleTags (very very nice).
• Improved archives. We now have a dedicated Archives page that takes advantage of the Extended Live Archive plug-in for Chronology (time-based archives), Taxonomy (category-based archives), and Folksonomy (tags baby! – – but these still seem to work a little strangely). And the “rolling archives” feature built right onto the homepage gives instant, “no refresh required” access to all prior posts.
• Refreshed look. Our Pemulis skin on top of the K2 framework gives us a cleaner, more fluid look-and-feel with enhanced features.

So why now? Because I was sick this weekend. And it was raining anyway. And IE7 came out so (in theory) all of my old PNG woes should be a thing of the past anyway. And I tipped over 1,000 photos in Flickr. And our 1 year anniversary of switching to WordPress was coming up anyway. And/but we’ll be busy with NaNoWriMo next month. And what do you care “why now” anyway?

Enjoy. (And chime in if you see anything broken or if you like and/or hate the new look!)

currently playing: Portishead “Only You”

About Rob Friesel

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