mission completed
posted by: Ralf Rottmann | posted @ Wednesday, September 12, 2007 10:28 AM | View blog reactions

I have spent a couple of nights and weekends to migrate my blog away from Textpattern and it's now running on the ASP.NET driven Subtext engine. As usually I do not very much like the default skins/themes so I could again not resist to jump right into theme designing for Subtext. During the past couple of weeks I ran into nearly every box model bug and browser inconsistency that exists - and hope that I tackled all of them. If not, please let me know!

My blog now runs on a dedicated, hosted IIS using ASP.NET 2.0 and Microsoft SQL Server 2005.

Why did I leave Textpattern behind?

Well, there are a couple of reasons:

  • My primary motivation was to finally get out of the PHP space. Without starting any religious debate about languages, object orientation and so on I have always been a strong believer in Microsoft technologies and I specifically like ASP.NET and the latest extensions which indicate the future direction. In addition I just love to create my sites in C#.

  • Besides this I am an investor of a small consulting company which focuses on Silverlight and other RIA technologies. Therefore I kind of had to migrate to a professional web application infrastructure as opposed to sticking with the usual suspects (PHP+MySQL).

  • While Textpattern is a very light weight and clean blogging engine I consider the Textpattern community as being very weak. There's just not much innovation coming out of the Textpattern project. This is entirely different when it comes to Subtext and in general to Microsoft ASP.NET.

  • I simply love Windows Live Writer (WLW)! I blog a lot and the ability to create my posts offline in a thick client environment and seamlessly publish them to Subtext is just beautiful. The Windows Live Writer integration into Subtext works perfectly fine and so much simplifies my life as a blogger. For me WLW is the best blog publishing tool available, today - and as with most of the Windows Live tools it's free.

I have started to migrate the former content to this new blog. (Textpattern lacks an easy way to export content into a reusable format.) This includes all your comments which you have been submitting over the years. I also made sure to preserve the original publishing date, so the archives will remain intact at this new place. It'll take some time until everything has been moved over manually, so please stay tuned. The former URL http://www.24100.net will be permanently redirected to my new hosted Internet Information Server as soon as I have finished housekeeping.

My blog's skin is based on the "Naked" skin which comes with the Subtext 1.9.5 install archive, so I have started from scratch. I have been inspired a lot by the work of Tim Heuer's skin. Tim is a developer evangelist at Microsoft and he has helped me getting started with Subtext, thanks Tim for the IM sessions and pointing me to the right direction.

The new blog will not make use of categories anymore except in order to differentiate a posts language. Instead I'll extensively use tags following the microformat which will facilitate Technorati and other integrations.

With all this said I thank you for all your feedback so far and hope to read you soon, again.

 

comments
Haacked stated:
# re: mission completed
Looks great! I'm glad you got it up and running and were able to get around the bumps you ran into.
posted on 9/12/2007 6:36 PM
Ralf Rottmann stated:
# re: mission completed
Thanks, Phil for taking a prominent look... Well, I finally learn Subtext more and more every day. And I started to write a series on Subtext skinning to let other participate ;-) .
posted on 9/12/2007 6:49 PM
Steven Harman stated:
# re: mission completed
Welcome Aboard!

Looking forward to the series on Subtext Skinning - documentation around skinning is one area that we really need to concentrate on. I'm sure that your experiences and the forthcoming posts will be a big help to other Subtext skin creators.
posted on 9/13/2007 7:03 PM
Ralf stated:
# re: mission completed
Hi Steve,

Thanks for visiting my just-born Subtext blog. Still lots of details to be fine tuned in the skin and I've just started to understand the plumbing. I like Subtext a lot, however, we gotta spread the word...
posted on 9/13/2007 7:25 PM
Robert G stated:
# re: mission completed
Ralf,

I am digging your design. Understated and classy. Couple of things I wanted to throw out there as you are designing.

1. I like the feature of the origami skin that allows you to set defaults in terms of font size, etc... On my page ( http://www.angryhacker.com/blog/ ), I've set the font size to be Xtra large, simply because I feel that anything else is basically unreadable on a high resolution monitor. So that option would be awesome.

2. Nothing pisses me off more when a site decides that I will have an 800 pixel wide experience, regardless of the size of my screen (kind of like osnews.com). I much prefer sites like slashdot or wikipedia that expand horizontally to the size of your window. If that functionality could be added to your skin, perhaps via an option like origami, that would be sweet.

Later
posted on 9/17/2007 12:35 AM
Ralf stated:
# re: mission completed
@Robert: Thanks for your feedback. I do understand your issues with "static" (e.g. width=800px) designs and while I like the capabilities of CSS I don't specifically like them for (my) blog.

For me design and content belong together. For example I do want the header/title picture of my blog (the one with the Silverlight sphere) to frame my blog entirely. Obviously I could have added a gradient to the left and right which would allow for stretching the image nicely, but again, I wanted to have it like that.

I don't know about the font sizes but as far as I know you can still use the built-in browser features to zoom the text size of my site - even when I have not built this feature in.

I personally have not seen many sites with full dynamic layouts that I liked from a design perspective.

As with so many thinks, everybody has his own opinion about these aspects and I value your feedback. Chances are I evaluate options to make my theme more dynamic but at this moment I like it exactly as it is. ;-)
posted on 9/17/2007 4:45 PM
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