Nov
2
Written by:
pendarvis
11/2/2010 1:00 AM
Welcome to the very first blabber entry at Pendarvis & Co.!
This is a soft launch (version 1.0) of the new Pendarvis & Co. site which I’ve lovingly birthed today. You can read more about the Who, What and Whys of P & Co. in the About page, but I’d like to devote this entry to say a few words about the design and development of this website and how it relates to personal gardening.
First, I’d like to thank Simon Collison, an online designer and author, for the design motif of the home page. Having spent the last four years working on bland corporate websites that are overly reliant on Yahoo’s yui skins, I was looking for an inventive point of departure from the cookie-cutter look and feel of generic forgettableness that I see on many websites. So looking for a unique thematic look, I came across Collison’s website via the book CSS Mastery, which he co-authored with Andy Budd and Cameron Moll. An online cabinet of gender-bender medical curiosities that has a field guide-like sense of categorical organization seemed perfect for a site devoted to a mad scientist’s perspective on invention, technology and artistic creativity.
Now, for the development platform. I used DotNetNuke (dnn), a free open source content management system (cms) for the dotnet platform. I’m still waiting for a c# install package (the default is vb.net) as I like to code in this programming language. The number of hours I’ve spent raking my hair either troubleshooting a skinning issue, debugging or bad module implementation still brings a few tears to my eyes just thinking about it. But I like dnn and I’m optimistic about its future prospects and hope more adventurous developers will adopt the dnn cms.
I plan to go into more specific detail on the technical logistics of using dnn as opposed to drupal, rubyrails, wordpress, or some of the other off the shelf cms packages out there, as well as list some future feature enhancements to this site in a later blabber entry, so stay tuned for that especially if you're interested in using dnn for your own site as I’ve spent some notable frustrated hours dealing with unfortunate coding bugs as well as a decent learning curve for dnn implementation.
Lastly, gardening. I once read somewhere that gardening is the means of cultivating a sense of place and I think this is a great analogy for maintaining a website. In the way that gardens can only flourish if you nurture, websites require the same devoted benevolent kindness to keep it healthy. There’s a certain balance that needs to be made between its natural organic tendency for growth and the necessity to prune excesses and rid the bugs. The soil only allows you to reap what you’ve sown and the product of your efforts is the content which should reign supreme over all else.
Thanks for listening,
- Danielle a.k.a. All Things Technical for P & Co.
P.S. If you have any technical questions or comments related to the development of this site, feel free to email me at danielle@pendarviscrisp.com or support@pendarviscrisp.com.
P.P.S. If you wish to reach out to us on anything related to our organization, send my better half an email at pendarvis@pendarviscrisp.com.