New look for www.hypercubed.com
Published Saturday, February 24th, 2007 at 10:50 am
Last year when I moved to DreamHost and made the jump from ASP to PHP I also migrated www.hypercubed.com from a flat file system to a Content Management System (CMS). A CMS is a system where the pages are stored in a database rather then in files on the server. This allows me to update the web pages directly on the web site rather then than editing the file and uploading it via FTP. This blog for example runs that way.
When choosing a CMS the main thing I was concerned about was allowing me to seamlessly integrate CMS’s served files with preexisting files on the server. Not only did I want to avoid the utterly nonsensical URLs like /node/q=34 but I also wanted to keep the distinction between a file and a folder. Most CMS’s force all URLS to look like a folder rather then a file (i.e. /about/ rather than /about.php or /about.html).
At the time I explored Drupal, Joomla, and some other CMS’s but in the end decided to simply use WordPress which I was familiar with as my blog platform. WordPress makes a decent CMS but not exactly what I needed. I quickly threw together an extension to get the file/folder distinction I wanted.
As the year pasted I started to regret this decision. Not because it didn’t work but because I felt like I was forcing a square peg into a round hole. WordPress is a blog, not a CMS. Then Drupal 5.1 was released in January so I gave it another try. Drupal 5.1 had everything I needed right out of the box. Setup was easy, customizing the look and feel was easy, finally a real CMS.
So if you go to www.hypercubed.com today you will see my brand new homepage powered by Drupal 5.1. Looks pretty good if you ask me. I think I spent more time on the spinning logo then setting up the sight. Having already converted all my flat files to WordPress last year speed up the migration to Drupal greatly.
One thing still bugs me though. Why do I need a blog and a homepage? Many of the information on my home page was really more deserving of a blog entry then a dedicated webpage and only existed on my homepage because I lacked a blog at the time. So in the process of moving to Drupal I deleted some old stuff, move some stuff to my blog, and in the end end up with very little on the homepage. So again… Why do I need a homepage?
In the end I figure it like this. My homepage (despite the name) is like my work phone. I would never answer my work phone with “Whatup’ Biatches!”. My blog on the other hand is my home phone (which I would also never answer like that but you get the point). I don’t want to worry that the first thing people see on my homepage is my latest blog entry discussing cursing fry’s employees or an article encouraging people not to fuck with Ovid. Sure my blog gets a lot more traffic then my homepage and the distinction is now very thin but I like the separation. I guess you can say that www.hypercubed.com and blog.hypercubed.com are my web based equivalent of a mullet… Business in the front, party in the back!