I’ve talked about it often enough and have, also often enough, expressed my frustration with getting a new version of livingwithmusic.com out the door. I’ve whined, I’ve bawled at times, I screamed, yelled and pulled out the little hair that God had granted me for my last few decades (hopefully) on this planet. Ever since I first thought about redesigning this site and actually mentioned it, I’ve watched a ton of really bad films (”aesthetics of bad taste” are what I strive for), saw a load of great concerts, gained a lot of weight and later lost some, was promoted, demoted and promoted once again, switched musical direction like a hare on crack, won friends and lost some, got older and giddier; in short, life progressed at a rather normal pace whereas this site was stuck in a dark deep void that I was unable to pull it out of. At the end I just hated it.

Well, friends and readers, rejoice!
It’s about to happen.
Version 2.0 is coming your way sooner than you think.

But, as usual, let’s backpedal here for a second.

As you might recall, this site (as if you cared) employs <a href=”http://expressionengine.com/” title=”ExpressionEngine”>ExpressionEngine</a> as its backend, that fabulous content management cooked up by <a href=”http://ellislab.com/” title=”Rick Ellis”>Rick Ellis</a> and constantly improved upon since its inception in, what, 2002 (it rose from the ashes that were pMachine, the backend I previously employed here), me thinks. I’ve been a devoted follower but have run into a solid brick wall with it once my vision deteriorated. About two years ago, my left eye took a hit and my vision has been going down the drain since then. It’s currently stable, but who knows how things will develop from here on?

Leaving the medical issues aside, fixing this site up and giving it a new shine became a thing of impossibility as I just wasn’t able to spend hours on end reading up on programming techniques, browser hacks and whatnot to get it off the ground. I have this wonderful - completed - layout lying around and would have needed ages to put it into motion.

So, I was faced with two options, the first of which I had been considering until January of this year. See, I had a substantial tax return hanging before my nose like an over-ripe carrot and thought I might invest some of that into hiring someone to turn my ideas into a workable site. The tax return arrived here - and substantial it was - and I was about to pull the trigger on a contract with a fabulous designer when everything inside of me screamed: STOP!

Typical, ain’t it?

The reason for pulling the plug on that option was (in hindsight) simple: I would have relinquished control of my site, not the content of it but the visual representation of it. The latter might not have been a big deal for all of you, but it was for me. See, I’d like to be able to tweak something into the site when the need arises, to redo a section or a color here or there, add a new menu or whatever when necessary. I would have been able to do that, but I would have needed to analyze someone else’s work to get it done. And I would have had to live with tweaking a nice setup into submission when my future changes might have clashed with whatever a hired designer had wrought to make the site behave in (most) browsers.

So, I went for option two, but only after it had presented itself approximately two seconds before I signed the above-mentioned contract.

Again, we need to backpedal a bit.

Option two had been around for a long time and what it encompassed was migrating my entire site from ExpressionEngine to <a href=”http://wordpress.org/” title=”WordPress”>WordPress</a>, that other superior content management system that has its feet firmly planted in the blogger camp and has since risen to more versatile status.

To be quite honest, option two I had subconsciously tried to avoid for a long time. I had given WordPress a serious spin once or twice and was aware of its pitfalls when compared to ExpressionEngine.

ExpressionEngine - for me - had always been virtually spam-proof, WordPress was not … unless you loaded it up with plugins to avoid the constant barrage of spam comments and spam trackbacks (I once started a new site in the “off” and within days I had more than 400 spam comments and trackbacks, Scary, to say the least, especially since I do believe that my penis is big enough).

I had gone through a series of updates with various versions of WordPress and I thought those were a drag. I ran into problems constantly, with - in my opinion - prematurely released updates and bug fixes and the constant chasing around for plugins that needed to be updated to work with the latest WordPress version. That the update procedure itself is less than user-friendly is, in comparison, a minor grievance.

I had experienced some severe crashes with WordPress, both on a post and a blog-wide level, resulting in some serious data loss.

The list of problems I had with WordPress was long.

Still, it had that one super advantage that ExpressionEngine is and was sorely lacking. WordPress was easily skinnable. And, in addition, those skins (or: themes) were easily tweakable if you knew a bit about what was in the various template files.

[fast forward]

As I was about to pull the trigger on the above-mentioned contract, I came across a theme for WordPress that was free (I had checked others in the same vein that were commercial) and was able to do what I wanted to do with my site. Within a day I set up a development section on livingwithmusic.com, I tried, tweaked and redesigned, added and subtracted, swore a bit and threw a couple of “That’s it!” into the silence that is my workroom and after about 24 hours on a day off, I was convinced that I had what I was looking for. Then I paid the creator of said theme $50 … call me cheap. It did save me about $900 dollars that option two would have cost, minimum.

That was about two weeks ago.

Since then, I’ve set up the backend (content management system), made it virtually spam-proof (yeah, if that was ever possible), integrated a statistics program, streamlined a few code fragments and tweaked the layout. One could say that the work on the backend is 90% done.

I’ve also exported all my posts (there aren’t that many of them) including comments from ExpressionEngine (just ask how difficult that was) and imported them into WordPress. That worked fine, but there were a few inconsistencies here and there that I had to fix by hand … a tedious job, to say the least.

Then I started going through each and every post dating back as far as the latter months of 2005 and began to restyle, reformat and redesign them. I also started preparing other posts on the side, ready for publication once the new version goes online. That step also included going through some long-lost posts that were - in updated form - worth republishing.

Although work is progressing steadily there, I would say that about 80% of the workload remains, especially since I’m also updating older posts with new information, pulled from the comments on this site or various forums around the Net, as well as creating new visual elements (actually only one) for each post.

I expect to be finished by the end of February, at the latest. This date is a conservative estimate as I intend to be finished two weeks before (currently, I’m ahead of schedule) and will then have to do the most difficult thing.

That last problem is the most bothersome, but it’s manageable and absolutely needs to be done. I need to tell the search engines that the site’s structure was fundamentally changed. I have managed to capture top spots on Google, Yahoo and others for several search terms and I would hate to lose those in the changeover. That’s why, for a week or so, I need to read up on the theory behind “permanent redirects” to put in place a file that tells every visiting search engine bot (cute little fellows that virtually race across the site to gobble up everything they find within seconds) where the old pages are in the new system and that they should update their hive memory with the appropriate new location.

When that is done, version 2.0 of livingwithmusic.com will go live.

At the end, livingwithmusic.com will become a bit more generic (lots of other people are using the theme, albeit not the way I tweaked it and set it up), but it is finally searchable (hasn’t been until now), it uses tags to help you access content in a much simpler way, it will probably also be expanded to include a news stream and, last but not least, it will offer a gallery which is on-site as opposed to off-site (flickr).

The last problem I might or might not conquer are the severe quirks the new site throws up in Opera (any latest version). I have not been able to discern yet why it doesn’t work on initial load (it does work after you’ve clicked any link), but I’m going to try to not disappoint the 2 Opera users frequenting my site.

Last, but not least, I will probably rejoin 9rules if they let me in again and set up relationships with some music sites I’ve been reading frequently. That way you might be able to get some information on releases I myself don’t talk about much here.

When done, I will post a last post on this old site here, so you can pick it up on your feed reader and, two days later, I will flick the switch.

Until then, it’ll be silent around here, I think.

When the time for version 2.0 comes, I hope you’ll still be around.

Cheers!

P.S.: While you weren’t looking, I have migrated <a href=”http://www.deus62.com” title=”deus62.com”>deus62.com</a> to WordPress and have turned it into a simple portal site providing access to all publicly available sites I run, <i>sans</i> any interactive elements whatsoever. Other sites might be added along the way. One or two readers might notice that I’m thinking of putting count-basie.com live again (believe you me, I’ve already started), albeit under the address of count-basie.de (don’t ask, it’s complicated and has to do with server power and script allowances). Once livingwithmusic.com is live, that one is next … and a bit more complicated to set up.

Categories: (07) Site
Tags: design, livingwithmusic.com, news, redesign, website