Daniel Marino

Site Maintenance

It’s bad when your site has only been live for two months, and you already need to clean things up. I suppose it’s kind of inevitable when you launch before you’re fully done designing and constantly looking to improve. I should note that I’m not a big fan of live redesigns. I did it with this site for two reasons: 1) To try something new and 2) My old domain was getting ready to expire and I needed to get something up on my new domain asap! When I’m doing work for clients though, I try to never go live until everything is done, and I mean completely finished.

I know (all four of you) are saying, “It looks the same to me…” and you’re not wrong in saying that. Most of the changes took place behind the scenes. I’ve cleaned up a lot of unnecessary XHTML and CSS. I’ve also cleaned up redundant code on the TextPattern end of things. Not everything is valid at the moment, but I’m still working on correcting that.

I have changed little visual things here and there. One noticeable change is on the blog page, I’ve added an archive section. I created this using the rss_suparchive plugin. I will add that I found it a real pain in the butt to figure out how to implement this plugin with its corresponding tag, rss_suparchive_menu. Once I did figure it out out, I felt pretty stupid because it seems so easy and logical now. I only wish that this plugin had better documentation.

I don’t know how much more I’m going to do to this site—other than posting blogs and new portfolio pieces. I like the idea of adding a search box for the blog archives, but I haven’t decided yet.