sysmango.com

Yesterday I noticed a problem while upgrading some of the modules that run the site. It should have been an easy issue. The version numbers for one or two of the modules did not reflect the versions that had been installed, and this was making another module complain, because at least one of the versions not being reported had a security problem.
I did some poking around and realized that I must have put an earlier version of at least one module in the wrong place, and the system was still seeing the old version in the wrong place, not the new version I just tried to install.
So, I went about and fixed this. I deleted what I thought were the wrong versions and made sure the new versions were where they should have been.
And that's when I made my mistake. I worked without a backup.
Some of the modules I use rely on other modules. The layout of some of the pages, including, it seems, the admin pages that only I see, fall into this category. And all of the relationships between modules, and where files are stored and how things go together are all stored in the database.

Hopefully this is the last post on the way that the website now looks. But this is not really about the redesign of the website than it is about how I tried to do the redesign. I tried to run the redesign using Google Wave.

If you don't know what Wave is, I don't think that you are really missing anything. Wave is a "preview" at a much earlier stage than Gmail was when it was first released (in preview/beta/whatever). With Gmail, everyone already knew what e-mail was. While some of us think we know what Wave is, I don't know that anyone actually realizes everything that Wave is eventually going to be when it grows up (if ever). [I spoke about my initial feelings on Google wave in an earlier post.]

The redesign started as some notes scrawled in a notebook, including some pretty poorly done drawings.

I'm racing to get this in before I have to start working for the day. Today I released an updated theme for SysMango.com. Looking at the theme, I can say that it's not done, not 100% done. It is good enough to put it up and see how it deals with the real version of this website. If anyone has any comments or suggestions, please feel free to leave a comment on this post. I know there are probably issues that I haven't seen yet, because I'm using Firefox and Google Chrome. I'm fairly certain that Internet Explorer will look awful. Sorry about that. Can't really make myself care about browsers that seem to refuse to follow standards. There are still changes to come, but this was the big change.

OR How I discovered how incredibly uninteresting I really am.

When I first started with Twitter and Facebook and MySpace, I really didn't expect anythign meaningful to come of it. I could see the possibilities that hte technologies presented, but I could also see the issues that bubbled beneath the surface.

My experimentation with MySpace didn't last all that long. In the time since I abbandonded the MySpace account (Sept 2007) to now, my attention has been paid to other services. Almost the same day, I created a Twitter account. About a month later I created an account on Facebook, about the day Facebook opened up the service to anyone and everyone.

Three years seems like a really long time to be using these services. And at times, each and every one of them loses whatever appeal they may have had.

July 09 to earlier this week. That's how long I've been thinking about upgrading the theme to this site, and doing nothing about it. Not one bit, not at all. This isn't to say that the theme I am using, a slight modification of the contributed 960 Robots theme, but it's not mine. And it's not really me. But I did think the header pulling in random stuff from Twitter was at least interesting. Over the weekend, I did start thinking again about what it was I wanted to do with this site. I was looking for something different in the theme than a lot of the contributed themes provide. This probably has something to do with the bit where a contributed theme, no matter how good or well designed (and a lot of them are great and really well designed these days) I'm just going to think about doing something different, somethign that works for just me, even if it means that I am, ultimately, going to be the only one that reads whatever it is I post here. So I might as well be happy with it, and experiment with the design until it makes me happy.