When I first created this website, I wanted a simple place for me to showcase my work, one that is sustainable, expandable, accessible and pleasant to experience. That simple aim, however, did not come easy. Mainly, technical and personal limitation are two of the frontmost reason keeping me to make things happen.
Rather than expanding, the site has been slimmed down parallel to the readership growth, layout has been simplified, features added and redundancy removed resulting in a more streamlined publishing & reading experience on both front & backends.
The latest change has been the biggest challenge, it’s one that has been a botheration since day 1. Creating a photo gallery and a blog are mostly a two-engine job, either you run a gallery with a blog, or you settle with a blog and add a gallery feature, both scenarios doesn’t fit my bill. But thanks to the massive community development and its extensive third party support, with WordPress 3 coming on the horizon and the excellent folks at GraphPaperPress this sort of marvel is now becoming a trend, showcase your work and blog about it — all from one place. Add to it the excellent blogging tool like MarsEdit 3 and WordPress for iPhone (where’s MarsEdit for iPhone/iPad, Daniel?), and we got ourself an always-on, accessible-everywhere studio/storefront/gallery/newsdesk.
For what it’s worth, WordPress is not a gallery engine, but a little hack will make one out of it; it’s blogging workflow is not perfect either, RSS output is downright limited, content rendering requires a lot of patience to figured out with. Inspired by kottke.org & daringfireball.net, solidify by this article, I have now implemented direct linking for the Linked List post on the RSS read.
The problem was simple, WordPress does not allow liquid content flow for longer articles (aka dumb), so if I want to run a snippet like how it used to run on the homepage (Title + Excerpt), I can’t have full content on the RSS front, when I enable full content on the RSS, my homepage’s grid based layout breaks. The solution was simple enough, but took longer to figure out; remove the blog snippet from the homepage and free the lion!
Feel free to refresh, or add this feed and you may feel something is right after all this time.