Posted on Saturday, February 23rd, 2008 at 3:41pm by Rob Wilkerson
When I switched to Chyrp not so many moons ago, I made the decision to take the new site live quickly rather than sit on it until everything was perfect. I have this tendency, you see, to tweak endlessly if I don’t do that. For me, the quest for perfection is often paralyzing and I didn’t have much faith that this site would ever go live if I held out. So I didn’t hold out.
Like many other blogging engines, Chryp offers the ability to craft a custom theme. Not being a designer, though, there wasn’t a chance in hell that I’d get it right – I mean really, really right – the first time. Or, in all likelihood, the thirtieth. Instead, I made just enough tweaks to the default theme so that the site remained functional, but felt more like, well, me. Most notably, I ditched the pastel colors because pastels are oh so very not me. I also shifted some stuff around to organize my content a bit, but that was the extent of my updates. Now, though, a revolution is brewing and I’m starting to dig a little deeper.
Today I deployed the first round of my (loosely) planned updates. Today’s release revolves around comments. Most of the changes are layout changes, but I did add support for Gravatars. If you don’t have a Gravatar, you should get one. Seriously. You want your comments to look cool, right?
Chyrp is still a bit of a new toy for me, so please let me know if you have any problems or spot any…wonkiness (that seems to be my new favorite word, of late).
design, chyrp
Posted on Wednesday, February 13th, 2008 at 7:46pm by Rob Wilkerson
Now that I’m a veteran blogger, having been dropping my questionable wisdom on the Internet for nearly an entire year (yeah, that’s sarcasm, folks), I’ve decided to expand – or maybe just brand – my presence a bit. I finally got around to buying a domain for personal use and now, like any new toy, I want to play with it. Mostly, though, it’s probably a control issue. I can be that way sometimes.
So this is my new home. For the last year I’ve been a happy customer of InstantSpot’s “social blogging” service and it’s been great. I like the service – especially since the 2.0 upgrade – and the guys that run it have been great to me (thanks Aaron & Dave). I just don’t have enough control. Surprisingly, they resisted my whispered requests for admin access to their source control repository. What’s that all about?
The new site – with blog baked right in – is powered by Chyrp. Lightweight, hopefully fast as hell, extensible, and easy. I like simple. My needs are pretty simple, my engine should be pretty simple. So far, this seems like a pretty nice alternative to the usual suspects.
Make no mistake about it, this is a new presence. There are bound to be growing pains and the design needs a little love from someone more capable than I, but I’m optimistic that there won’t be anything that tests the bounds of normalcy for a new endeavor. I’m also hoping that you folks will help me out. Please let me know if you have any trouble with the site, any suggestions for the site or generally see something that looks amiss.
chyrp
