On Site Revamp

I put off redesigning my site for a quite a long time. I think the main reason was I wasn't sure what I wanted to my main site be about. Think of it as an identity crisis for my webspace. Should it be a personal blog? Or perhaps a strictly professional portfolio? What should I do about my existing Blogger thingy? The list goes on.

So without too much of a plan in mind, I just started working. I started with my old homepage as a base and tweaked around. I switched to different layouts and thought about different techniques to keep the site maintainable and modularized. I feel very satisfied with what I have so far. In fact, I like it so much more than the current one that I've decided to replace my homepage before I've even completed it.

In the end, the redesigned yielded a very simple portfolio site. I stripped out the heavy-weight Rails homepage that I previously had because for the most part, I served static pages. Rails just became this overkill beast of a framework which kept my URL's pretty and my web server crawlin'. The switch to plain XHTML made such a huge difference in speed. On top of that, I don't feel like I've lost any functionality to the site because I can get pretty URLs by using Apache's URL rewriting engine, and I can achieve dynamic content through server-side generation and caching.

Many things still need to be done for the site, but I like the foundation I've set up for myself so far. RSS, pagination, and more ease of use and maintainability are high on my feature lists.