Tuesday, July 1, 2008

EE upgrade 1.6.4

I have upgraded the ExpressionEngine software behind the scenes in The BradLands to the latest version 1.6.4. Everything seems to have gone smoothly. Do let me know if there's anything amiss.

Monday, July 9, 2007

The BradLands version 6.0

I'm bringing sexy Helvetica back! Yep, The BradLands were closed over the weekend ("Moose out front should'a told ya") while I ported the site over to run on Expression Engine (EE) and gave the place a new coat of pixels. Not everything is back in place yet—this here weblog and The Daily Brad are good to go—but I'll be adding content and tweaking things on a continuing basis. The oldest content that hasn't made the transition during the past two redesigns will eventually make it here as well.

This is the third site—after SXSW Baby! and the site for The Rep—that I've built with Expression Engine and it just continues to impress (and, occasionally, frustrate) the hell out of me. It has given me the opportunity to learn quite a few new things, though, and developing all of the sites I work with regularly on the same platform certainly has its advantages. I'll have some more to say about EE in a while, including some tips and tricks I've picked up along the ascent of its learning curve.

I'd decided to port The BradLands to EE a while ago, but I was still a bit reluctant to move away from Movable Type, particularly after having the opportunity to beta test their awfully slick new 4.0 version. I still have a few small projects running MT, and when the new version is finished, I'll give it a good look before making any other transitions.

One final bit of housekeeping: If you're subscribed to the old site RSS or Atom feeds, the redirects I put in place should flip your feed reader over to the Feedburner versions. Just to be sure, though, you might want to check your subscriptions. This weblog is now feeding http://feeds.feedburner.com/MustSeeHttp and The Daily Brad is at http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheDailyBrad (and yes, I am planning to resume writing over there, thanksforasking).

Let me know if you find anything terribly wrong with the site, won't you?

Tuesday, February 6, 2007

Baby, baby, baby…

One intense weekend struggling with assorted import and export nonsense and, voila, the new SXSW Baby! awakens from a long winter's nap. Yes, friends, it's only a few short weeks until the annual pilgrimage south of the boredom for South by Southwest Interactive (and Film and Music), and your favorite site for news, tips and trivia is live. Be good to the Baby!, and the Baby! will be good to you.

The main blog is up and running and some other features, old (such as the Ride/Room Share board) and new (stay tuned!) will be coming online shortly. If you're planning the trip to Austin this year—or even considering it—pop on over and check it out.

This is the second major site I've built with the new love of my content-managing life, Expression Engine. The robust blogging features of the software (including unlimited custom field, status and category groups), built-in membership and community management, and extremely flexible templating system are really, really nice.

There's a slightly steep learning curve (steeper still when you're..., well, me), but once I ascended it, the site-building process seems the most natural thing in the world. The EE documentation is extensive, although I would love to see a "...For Dummies" book or its like; that would definitely have given me a jump-start last year when I was beginning to learn it. But there's an active community growing up around the software, a new "fan magazine" online and more and more sites every day to serve as good examples. (Plus the pMachine crew are planning a SXSW meetup.)

And I'm planning, eventually, to convert The BradLands to run on EE as well. My heart is still full for Blogger, Movable Type and, yes, even Frontier and my own miserable hand-coding. But one of the main goals of this site has always been to learn, and EE's basis of PHP and MySQL offer a great opportunity to push my meager skills along the path. In my copious free time...

Anyway, check out SXSW Baby! and perhaps I'll see you in Austin.