I’ve been looking at it for quite some time, but I’ve finally pulled the trigger. My website/blog/home of the awesome sauce, dangayle.com, has now been ported completely over to Posterous. As a web designer, I love the fact that I could totally do whatever I stinkin’ wanted on my site. I could host images, I could scrap the design at will and start over (which I have done, just not recently). WordPress really is one of the best solutions for a lot of people’s needs. But, as it turns out, it’s not the solution to MY needs.

WordPress = Boring and old and crappy

The problem is that I’m bored with it. I’m sick of the micro-updates that totally jack up the website every three months because someone introduced a new bug into the system. The fact that they haven’t branched WordPress into a secure long-term support (LTS) branch and a current branch has ruffled a few feathers, including mine. I’m sick of having to deal with updates. And, quite honestly, I’m bored with PHP, the foundation upon which the WordPress empire was birthed. No offense to PHP programmers, but the language feels old tech. I’m not even a fully qualified programmer, but I can see it. It Python the be-all, end-all? Judging by the size of the stupid O’Reilly “Learning PHP” and “Programming PHP” tombs, Python must be a beast. I don’t want to learn it simply because I like the O’Reilly books, but I don’t want to heave those things around. Maybe Ruby is the answer. Anywho, I’m straying off the point.

Easier to post = more posting = better blog

And while I control it, I never post to it like I should. A blog that no one posts to is simply fruity. Posterous makes it easier to post to because it uses an interface that I use all the time: email. I’m always emailing stupid videos or interesting links or whatnot to people. What I like about Posterous is that I can simply add post@posterous.com to the recipient list, and BOOM! Tough Actin’ Tinactin. I mean, BOOM! Posted to my blog. Like this John Madden Youtube video:

In conclusion

There really isn’t a conclusion. It’s going to be an ongoing debate in my mind, and at my place of work, what is the best platform/what is the best programming language/etc. I honestly think that we should be able to accomplish anything we can think of at this point, and if it’s a language or a platform that is getting in the way, then it’s old tech. Time to bring out yer dead and toss it on the pile, even if it’s not quite dead yet. So, yes, Posterous. I like it. I got it set up, posts imported, domain transferred, everything. Less than an hour. Sweet.

So, without further ado, here is our list:

• Monday. This is the worst day of the week, somber and melancholy. Thus, we chose the theme “Blue Monday.” On Blue Monday, we play Death Cab for Cutie, Radiohead, the Shins, or any other similarly low-key melodies.
• Tuesday. This is a day in flux, where motivation can make or break your productivity for the week. To help pump up the production, we pump up the volume on “Techno Tuesday.” Aphex Twin, Boards of Canada, Orbital, Depeche Mode, or other random synth-based music may apply. Unless we get bored of it, in which case it becomes “Totally Disco Tuesday.”
• Wednesday. All of the aggression of the whole week is focused upon this one day. To keep us in the mood, we have “Hump Day”, which is not meant to be taken in a literal way Hump day is our heavy music day.
• Thursday. We ran out of themes, but we knew we needed a day to listen to our Foreigner radio station on Pandora.com. So there you have it.
• Friday. TGIF. “Casual Friday” is the day to relax. We be jammin’ to some Reggae, or other cool vibes.

So, what would your themes be?

For example, I recently created an application form called “short_form” because it was an intermediary form with only 4 inputs that fed into a large 40+ input form. I named the rollover submit button, imaginatively, “application_submit_rollover”. These things, in and of themselves, are not a problem. It’s when you start duplicating things that you will start running into issues.

Now take short_form and duplicate it. It is on a separate, but related web page that uses its own CSS and its own image directory. Me, being lazy, decides that instead of renaming everything, I would simply restyle the same elements and replace the images with different images, but retain all of the same naming conventions.

Man, I felt productive on that day.

Then came the decision to pull that separate page into the original site. Uh oh. Now we have a problem.

Now I have two different forms with completely different styles and images, but the same #ids. Not only that, but to my chagrin, I discovered that another designer had created yet a THIRD application using similar naming conventions. But of course, instead of “application_submit_rollover.PNG” he named his image “application_submit_rollover.GIF”, further complicating the issue.

Long story short, we had to spend more time fixing our naming issues than it would have taken us to create the forms from scratch with appropriately, and UNIQUELY, named elements.

So take it as a lesson learned: Shortcuts taken to increase productivity can in the end come back to haunt you. Take the time to do things correctly, and you can better spend your time worrying about the issues that really matter.