I love writing code. I love learning to write code… but I have to admit it, everything I’ve ever programed is just a re-invention of someone else’s wheel. I’ve decided that I’m finally done with it; it’s time to get some ‘hot wheels’! Other awesome programmers have come before me and created some wicked apps, so why am I wasting my time creating my own? Well, I learned a lot but it’s time to move on.

So what’s going on?

Well basically what I’ve decided is that I’m sick of writing custom code for things that I want my website to do. I’m sick of writing basic sripts that really just replicate what has already been done much better by someone else. Let’s face it… I’m an artist and designer first… a programmer and technical analyst second. Yeah, I do get some kind of pleasure from seeing my simple programming actually work… but it’s starting to get to that point where there are just too many things to program and not nearly enough hours in a day.

So, now that I’ve spent a good paragraph beating around the bush… I may aswell let the cat outta the bag. I am ditching the custom code that runs this website and putting my custom CMS projects on the back burner indefinitely. Why? Well, let’s just say that I don’t want to have to write any more code for this site… but if it were to become a bit more popular… I would have to because I would inevitably start getting spammed through my extremely simple comments system. There really are a lot of other good reasons as well…. but maybe a little more than I could cover in the scope of just this one short article. Suffice to say that there are just WAY too many features that I would like implemented on my site… and I’d never get it all done programming it myself.

So what am I gonna do? Well, that’s been a tough choice. Right now I am trying to decide between Wordpress (my initial choice) and Drupal. Both are extremely good open source systems that can do everything that I need for my site. Originally I wanted to use Wordpress because I want my site to be a blog… be syndicated like a blog… and, oh, well, I guess wordpress is just a tad cooler than Drupal… and again that’s a big reason. Another reason why Wordpress was my initial thought was because of the Loop… I need to be able re-sort the same posts a few times on the homepage. I want the latest image to be a preview kind of size, I want other recent gallery entries to be little square thumbnails… further down the page. Then, in the next column, I will want to loop through my posts again display all the posts that are in a Projects category.

You see… this whole move is all about web 2.0. I want to contribute to the concept of a tagged web; it just makes sense to me. So, the whole idea of using a Wordpress was primarily the idea of using Categories (taxonomy) to structure and organize the new version of the site. There wasn’t any reason that I can’t do that with Drupal though, it simply didn’t seem apparent to me how I would do that… until recently. I’ve been spending the past week re-building a very large website using Drupal and I have to say, it’s really starting to grow on me.

Regardless of which application I decide on for the new backbone of Bamboo Studios, it will free me up to focus on what I am really good at: making stuff look cool. Yes, it’s high time I started to really focus on my strengths here and I have to say that writing technical articles about web design and publishing them alongside my artwork really isn’t working. I don’t think it makes sense, and people are certainly not going to look to me as any kind of authority on the subject… at least not yet. The new version of this site is going to focus more on my art and design work and a lot less on my writing. There will still be a blog here… but it will be entirely based around around artwork and traditional design rather than around web design. I am in the process of creating a new home for my really geeky type web stuff… and I’ll announce that project as it nears completion.

Check back again soon. There really is an all new version of this site on the way and it will be uber cool, I assure you.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 17th, 2006 at 12:51 pm and is filed under Blogging, Web Design, BambooStudios, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.