Flow of Logic

Theme: Winter Scenic

Wed, 24 Dec 08 22:27:31 -0800

As you may have noticed, Flow of Logic is now wearing a new theme, which I call Winter Scenic. This has been a rather stressful few hours, as I had forgotten that it's Christmas Eve and I hadn't finished my Winter Themed Design Project! Okay, so since last time, I have implemented the gradient sky, fixed the holly, added snow, and added a snowman. IE6 users don't get to see the trees and snowman at the bottom because they use a crappy browser. As far as I know everyone else is fine. Seriously, if you find an issue, tell me please. Flow of Logic is going to keep this theme through New Year's before reverting to Oregon. I might release this as a Habari theme midway through the week, and perhaps as a WordPress theme later (Karthik might do the WP instead, actually). It's far from perfect, but it'll do for now. TODO:

Sides. The sides of the content area class with the sky. My hope for next year is to have this fixed.
Better trees. The trees don't really go well.
A ton of other stuff -__-;
Replace holly with a mistletoe, put a snowwoman next to the snowman

Ugh, I have a ton of sources that I have neglected to keep track of, and must hunt down and list. ~~Expect them to start popping up in this post later.~~ Sources

RSS Icon from: http://www.ajaxpath.com/christmas-rss-icons
Holly from: http://pstutorialsblog.com/33/christmas-holly-tutorial/
Trees from: http://graphics-illustrations.com/2007/11/05/christmas-card-photoshop-tutorial/
Font used for headings and title: Fertigo Pro
Main content background generated using: http://bgpatterns.com/
Much thanks to Smashing Magazine, without which I would have had a much harder time finding stuff to use.

As always, feel free to insult and ridicule my work.. Oh, and Happy Holidays everyone Merry Christmas :)

Winter Themed Design Project

Tue, 16 Dec 08 21:44:11 -0800

I'm working on a Winter Themed Design right now. It's far from finished, but it's looking good so far. I plan on releasing this as a Habari theme and probably a WordPress theme. I'm having some problems with the cool trees effect in IE. Please leave any kritiks, suggestions, ~~insults~~, etc. Screenshot:

Site Launch: Lateral Code

Sat, 06 Dec 08 19:47:54 -0800

Lateral Code is a collaborative work (running Wordpress) between myself and Karthik Viswanathan. We're sort of trying to decide what direction to take with it, so we're just plodding along for now. I must say, after a few weeks hacking at Habari, I have grown unused to working with Wordpress, I feel quite disgusted by how many files and functions I have to search through just to hack one part.

A week with Habari

Sat, 29 Nov 08 16:40:44 -0800

So it's been a week since I installed Habari (my installation tells me 8 days? okay) and here are my thoughts so far.

Pros

It's light: Habari's base install comes out to be about 2.5mb compared to 4.5mb for WordPress and 15mb for Movable Type.
It's database independent: As mentioned a a previous post, I can't really afford MySQL, so Habari is perfect because it supports SQLite.
It has a simple but aesthetically pleasing backend: Controls are done through a JavaScript dropdown menu that can be accessed using keyboard shortcuts.
The code is readable: One of the things I love doing when I get something is to tear it to shreds and see what's inside. I love how easy to read Habari's code is, meaning I can hack it that much faster or easily. I even learn new PHP techniques from reading the code. When I look at WordPress' (monstrous) code I actually have to, well, decode it before I can understand it.

Cons

(Not-so-much) Lack of Functionality: The user base isn't very large, and as such the development base is even smaller. There aren't a lot of plugins available, but the important ones are all there.
Lack of Themes: Same thing as functionality, not a lot of people, so not a lot of themes being written. Whereas WordPress has a few hundred themes, if not more, floating around the net, there are maybe twenty to thirty themes for Habari total. Not really a problem for me, as I prefer custom theming, but not everyone can design websites.

vs. WordPress

Before I noticed my hosting bill racking up too quickly, I had Flow of Logic running on WordPress. Here's what I've noticed in comparing the two.

Backend: WordPress has a very large backend - different parts of the admin area are spread out all over the place, while Habari has a much more centralized backend - every part of the admin area is accessible from the little dropdown menu in the upper left corner.
Theming: Habari uses a lot of PHP5 in it's theming - for example, getting the title of a post would use $post->title, whereas WordPress uses a lot of proprietary methods - for example, the equivalent of the previous example would be the_title(). This ties back into Habari's readability, as mentioned before
Community: Habari has a pretty small community, while WordPress has a pretty large one. If I had a problem with WordPress, chances are I could Google it and I would find the solution, but with Habari I might have to submit it to the problem tracker.

You can read more about Habari at Habari's website or try out the demo (username/password are demo/demo)