Miklb's Mindless Ramblings

Perhaps I’m just a sucker for a reason to say things are going to change, but this little flash site to create your 2010 resolution spun one my way that dove tails into the last post I made on this site.

Speaking of the site, to ring in the new year I finally updated Habari, as it was oh, 300+ revisions behind latest commit. Aside from having to upgrade a bunch of plugins from before the XML file as added and the info function removed, it went off without a hitch. I also had to swap out a little code in the tweet template, but otherwise, for a script running off of trunk that hadn’t been svn upped since May, it was pretty damn painless, and a testimony to how stable it really is.

I do have some ideas for my cooking site, inspired by Christian and his 365 days of photos in ‘09. Congrats again for seeing it all the way through!

Perhaps not a dish a day, but maybe one new thing from scratch a week with a post would be a good and realistic goal.

Anyway, may MMX be a shining path of peace and enlightenment paved with prosperity a…I mean, may it fucking suck less than 2009 did, and hopefully we’ll get through it a little less scarred than the last.

Special thanks to Mike Lietz for talking me down from the ledge I was on after I started the upgrade, and especially for showing me the handy svn wildcard command. Most of the plugins I had were already trunk version from the Habari-Extra’s repository, but I thought I was going to have to cd into each one and svn up, he showed me I could do

svn up user/plugins/*

and it would step through the directories and svn them up. Handy!

I’d also like to take a second to thank Rick Cockrum for keeping the ball moving this past summer/fall on the development side of things, I’m really looking forward to digging into the new taxonomy system, especially as I build out the cooking site.

This started out as a simple comment on Rachel’s design blog, but started getting wordy, so I converted it to a post w/trackback. (Which may be a thought for a future post, what is too long of a comment?)
The part I found myself relating to was the design of Squible, and user experience, which I found myself having recently gone through.
I had gotten busy, neglected my blogging, and when I got back into the swing of things,felt a new look was in order. Not having that much time, I opted for Squible. A good friend who also blogs noted that he “just couldn’t get his head around that format”. I fought changing things back for some time, but that comment hung around in the back of my head. I kept thinking that this guy is a “web guy, a designer. If he can’t get around it, what about the other 150+ a day that stumble upon place.” So when I changed hosts, and upgraded, I tried Squible for all of about 20 minutes, and then cobbled together a more traditional blog design.
Not that as a fledgling, wanna-be designer I don’t want to push my envelope, but I have to come back to the user experience. Much as my cooking evolved from wanting to be “everychef”, that is, I wanted to be Charlie Trotter, Jean Louis Paladin, Alan Susser, and Jean Georges Vongrichten on every plate. Little by little, I learned that my guests weren’t looking for me to defy gravity and mix flavors that might not otherwise be mixed, simply for the sake of “pushing the envelope”. It took me a long time to understand that my guests wanted a good meal. Sure, an unexpected flavor that contrasts but doesn’t detract, or a creative yet accessible presentation is fine, but make it edible. But I digress.
I still want to push envelopes, and broaden horizons, and all those clichés, but first and formost, I want the ramblings, and info to be accessible, and to flow in some manner that people will “get”.

So I’ve had so much fun working with WordPress and this blog, that I’m putting together another. It’s a food oriented one, something I’ve wanted to do since I first surfed the web. Hopefully it will provide people with ideas for tasty, and usually easy dinners. Interspersed will be appropriate posts on food and nutrition. So do me a favor, bounce over to cooking with miklb and check it out, and see if it’s something you might find interesting. It’s still in the development phase, but it’s never too soon to get feed back.