Redesign In Progress

In addition to being rebranded with a new name, our home on the Web will be getting a fresh coat of paint. Plus, I’m fixing some of the things that annoyed me about the previous incarnations. Probably the biggest improvement is with the photography galleries: browsing forward and backward now keeps you within the same category.

Once I’ve debugged all the templates, I’ll update our server for all to see.

Rebuilding from Static Files

Our previous Web-site hosting company, Mesopia.com, corrupted our MovableType database during a recent server relocation. Our only choice was to recreate the database based on static HTML files I downloaded from our Web site.

This has taught me several lessons:

1. Always generate a backup version of every posting in XML format with all the data necessary to regenerate the post.

2. XHTML is your friend. Because our posts all validated as strict XHTML, I was able to use XSL transformations to convert from the static post to an XML representation, which I later used to generate an MT import file.

I’ll be redesigning the site in the next week or two, and I’ll be keeping these hard learned lessons in mind.

Anna’s Head Presents 2

I’ll be damned if I can remember the details, but last night’s dream combined:

• werewolves
• knitting
• my high school reunion
• wearing a red dress that looked like flames
• Matthew Broderick or Robert Downey, Jr. (I don’t recall which)
• three shots of tequila
• frozen Mexican food

Whew. That might explain why I am still so tired.