I noticed recently it’s been almost two years since I did this site design. That I’m not so bored with it yet, I guess speaks either of my limitless ability to avert said boredom, or that I managed to do something I still like. Yes, I would like to do something new, though I imagine i would be within the recognised set of possibilities springing from this, the previous design, and my love of monochrome.

More likely though, I’ll get serious about transferring over to WordPress. The search function on Movable Type (whatever archaic version I’m running) is abominable, the whole way it generates static pages is a throwback to align=centre and using tables to lay out content. But I’ve written so much by hand I’m not sure how easy it will be to carry this over to WordPress. My excuse therefore.

And a friend asked about the smart Flash titles I was using, courtesy of sIFR, and I said, “oh my version has probably been outdated”, which turned out to be prescient; version 3 is now current. The I noticed on Daniel’s laptop the titles were ‘degrading rather elegantly’ back to CSS. It was peculiar to see my site naked like this. And so I discovered Flash PlugIn 10 is not compatible. And so I need to upgrade sIFR3. uuuhhh… I’m wondering if I should just kick myself into transferring to WordPress?

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(a slight addition)

I’ve spent a couple of hours working on upgrading to sIFR3, and… it wasn’t that difficult, so the title on the index page should be working, but…

Several things are obstacles I don’t want to attend to right now. The first is really my lack, at the time I first did this in keeping notes on the settings of the fonts I used, so I’m not sure for example if the date was done in Helvetica Neue or Helvetica Neue Light. There’s also a little weirdness in the date being displayed, which because of various other annoyances with my ftp I don’t feel like doing right now.

The biggest blah though is Movable Type. I forgot its delightful ‘rebuild’ function, which means to make the necessary changes, I need to rebuild every one of the couple of thousand of pages, and until it’s all working properly on one page, I’m not going to do this.

Actually it’s a good reason to change to WordPress, which does it dynamically, and the page templates split reuseable parts of pages, like the title and heading off into separate things, then combining them when the page is loaded.

Also might be a good reason to think about redesigning the site…

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(a slight addition again)

More playing and finding it works but jumps around and breaks the formatting and other things that sIFR2 didn’t do, and well, it doesn’t seem worth fixing anymore on Movable Type when I plan to transfer to WordPress, so I’ll leave just the title working and delay on the rest until I a) make the move and b) do a site redesign. Something for winter…