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expressionengine

Starting again

by Dave Foy on August 8, 2009

I’m standing at a crossroads.

Professionally at least, I’m at a clear fork in the road. The circumstances that have led me to this point — the unhappiness and profound professional dissatisfaction of the last year or so — are now firmly behind me (thankfully). Or at least, they will be soon. I’ll get round to writing a blog post with all the details.

More importantly though, I know without doubt which path to take from here. I should do, mind: it’s taken 3 hours research a night, every night for the last 3 months to figure out the way forward, so to say I’m excited about the road ahead is beyond understatement — quite frankly, I’m ecstatic. And yes, I have a whole blog post about that too. I’ll get round to that soon too.

So what’s that got to do with fuzzyness, this blog?

Well, largely due to the aforementioned professional misery, I’d lost the plot a bit with this blog. I feel the need to re-group. It’s hard to clearly explain why, without explaining what’s behind me on this road and what I can see in the distance ahead. But yes, I’ve neglected things round here, and it’s time to apply some love.

For now, it’s enough to say that I just need to write again. Twitter is not enough (though I’d come to feel that it was for a good while). I miss writing properly: the creative satisfaction of crafting a perfectly worded post that both informs, hits the mark and entertains the reader. But also, really, I miss just plain getting it off my chest, and in more than 140 characters.

If future plans run as expected, I’ll be doing lots more writing anyway. It’s all good practice here. More on that later though.

So, things are different round here, with me professionally, with me personally, and with this blog.

In making plans for the future (see above), I’ve been extensively researching blogging and writing tools, and it’s fair to say I’ve completely fallen in love with Wordpress. Fuzzyness now runs on Wordpress. This is quite a big deal for me — I build all my clients’ sites on ExpressionEngine and while I’d never consider Wordpress for hardcore CMS purposes, for writing-focused websites I’m totally and uttterly enamoured.

Wordpress encourages writing (for writing’s sake), in a way that ExpressionEngine does not. The online interface is beautiful, it makes me want to write in itself, but the add-on tools that plug in to Wordpress just make me excited to want to write more and more.

The desktop writing tool MarsEdit warrants a whole series of envangelising blog posts in itself, just a joy to use; Wordpress for iPhone means I can write and post from anywhere; the Wordpress Thesis theme — oh! let me count the ways! Again though, not right now…

So, with changing plans and changing tools, I’ve taken the chance to implement a re-design. I’m down to 1 column. Better typography. Better archives. Simpler, cleaner, a tighter focus on the content.

There are no simple import scripts for transporting a site from EE to Wordpress so I’ve done it the hard way: copy-and-paste, one post at a time. Some posts have fallen by the wayside, as have some comments. Never mind. This site has always been about natural evolution since the beginning anyway.

That’s it for now. I’m positively giddy about the next stage, about the future.

Thanks for reading so far.

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ExpressionEngine 2.0 gets me giddy

by Dave Foy on March 15, 2008

Having finally got a sneak preview of the goodness that will be ExpressionEngine 2.0 I have to admit that I can barely contain my excitement. read more »

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Feed formatting woes

by Dave Foy on November 16, 2007

I’ve been bothered recently (only slightly) that my RSS feed doesn’t honour the formatting I’ve set for my custom fields in ExpressionEngine.

Although I output a custom field that is formatted with Textile, it gets output as one globulous mass of text in most feed readers. As I say, no really big deal, but…

I found out today that I simply needed to change


<description>
{exp:xml_encode}{journal-summary}{/exp:xml_encode}
</description>

to


<description>
<![CDATA[{journal-summary}]]>
</description>

in my RSS template. Now my paragraphs, links and images display as intended in RSS feeds.

Hope someone else finds that useful.

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Coda + EE sitting in a tree

by Dave Foy on November 10, 2007

I’ve trialled Coda (Panic’s ‘one-window’ web development app for Mac OS X) a few times now, being a long-time Transmit enthusiast.

Until today, it’s never really stuck – I just find myself heading for several apps in several windows by default, it jars with my workflow too much. Particularly, I work a good deal of my time in ExpressionEngine, and while there certainly are ways of working with flat files (rather than browser-based textarea templates), it’s never really gelled with me as method I can comfortably use.

Somehow today it’s all come together for me: read more »

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