I’m back from my trip, mission accomplished, and working on getting the redesign online. Contrary to my last post this is going to take a while. Bringing the 800+ posts here into line with the new design is going at the rate of one month a day and I’m currently back in October 2005.
It will be worth it, and I’ve learned a lot in the process. In case you’re considering an equally expansive redesign, or are moving from one blogging system to another, here are a few tips on future-proofing which will spare you some pain.
1. Grab your content
It’s depressing to see the witty post you wrote about a skateboarding dog ‘brick’ because the video you’re discussing has been deleted from YouTube and the older your blog, the more likely that is to be true. Using a site like Video Downloader allows you to save media you link to locally and guarantee your old posts won’t rot. Having files embedded on your server also keeps readers on your site and gives other bloggers a reason to link to your blog, and not the page you’ve linked out to.
2. Label everything
Thanks to quirks in Internet Explorer, designing webpages which can be seen by all is still more complicated than writing valid code. The hacking IE mandates often means referring to particular page elements specifically and doing that requires they all have unique identifiers. That doesn’t require custom classes, just a page design which makes sidebars, content, posts and navigation all easy to specifically identify, saving you from modifying things you want to leave alone when you tweak your stylesheet. For example, if you use a list to create a menu, make sure you can select it without selecting other lists in your posts.
Guess who’s just had to re-format every list element on their blog?
3. Avoid Microsoft Word
Word is doubtless the best wordprocessor and worst web design tool known to man. Use of word’s ‘Save as HTML’ option will produce the nastiest, least managable webpages you can imagine. Even running them through Dreamweaver’s ‘Clean up’ filter still leaves them looking weird and populated with odd code and inline styles. Don’t use it and if you have to, decruft its output by hand in a text editor before you post anything it spews up.
4. Manage you permalinks
The biggest tragedy of using blogger.com is that a move to your own domain means breaking every link to your site. Even if you own your domain, the location of your webpages should never change and that requires forward thinking. Even if you plan on posting once a week make sure there’s enough specificity in your permalinks to allow for daily posts should your blog change. Re-directing years of posts isn’t fun.
5. Save your originals
Until the web gets considerably more sophisticated the size of images will be a by-product of page design. Resizing works okay when you’re downsizing but trying to make a 200 pixel image fit a 400 pixel space is ugly. If you save a copy of every image you post to your blog, in its original form, you can always re-process photos to fit changes in design, a simple task with PhotoShop.
6. Make a stylesheet
Every magazine and newspaper has a stylesheet which detrmines how pages are formatted, paragraphs are indented, the heirachy of subtitles and the appearance of lists. Making a stylesheet for a blog is an excellent idea. Without one you’ll discover that on different days you’ve decided italics, bold text and capitals are all perfect tools for doing the same job and your pages will be inconsistent. A commitment to a system of rules is easier for you, easier for readers to understand and easier to change down the line with a simple search and replace.
7. Work around plugins
Plugins are some of the coolest bits of Wordpress but using them means your blog is vulnerable should they break or or fail to be updated as the system develops. Putting your plugins inside an ‘If’ query which checks that they’re present means your blog won’t break if you have to pull them out. Instead of writing this into your design template:
<?php FOO_PLUGIN() ?>
Write this:
<?php if (function_exists('FOO_PLUGIN')) { ?>
<?php FOO_PLUGIN() ?>
<?php } ?>
That way if your plugin’s missing your blog will politely move on rather than hemorrhage.
As you can probably guess, at various times I’ve ignored all these pieces of advice which is why it’s now taking me an hour to fix 10 old SugarBank posts. It’s dull. Don’t learn from your mistakes, learn from mine - I’ve got plenty spare.