smackfoo.com | I find your lack of faith disturbing.

Welcome traveller, to the new and permanent home of the old incoherently surreal - smackfoo.com.

Now, before I begin, this is likely to be the single largest entry in the history of this blog, so feel free to pack energy bars and or a caffeinated beverage.. comfy? Great! Lets go.

Firstly, this entry will be broken up into two sections, the first will run through the new design, the second will be a (breif) run-down on the reasons for moving, for those who have not caught up with the disappointment that is dreamhost.

I also have some “wicked shit” rewrite rules in place to map old content URIs to new URIs - which I’ll cover in the next post, too.

The design.

The new design is based on the css and imagery of the original foliage theme by Derek Punsalan. The core of the theme, however, has undergone surgery to a degree where much of the template has been re-written and re-designed.

The original header tabs are still in use - they provide fast and highly visible navigation and will be built on to add additional resources. They also help by delineating where in the world Carmen Sandiago you are, in relation to the rest of the blog.

There are a number of new features added to the design, with del.icio.us returning to fulfil the role of ’shorts’. I found an asides category was hard to manage and didn’t add a great deal of value. Given that del.icio.us was designed, at least in part for this role, it seemed to make sense to put it to good use.

The bottom of the template has also received a brush-up, with more useful navigational and historical elements added to provide a much needed method to review recent entries, navigate around and generally access all the content.

The blog is also broken up into three distinct areas:

• taxonomy - the tags
• folksonomy - the external (still in development)
• chronology - the archives

I’ll cover the philosophy behind the reasons for the three distinct areas in more detail in the next post, but the general idea is I wanted to use the above ’sections’ to help manage content and again, give you, the reader, a better idea of where you are.

The Reasons.

For those who have followed my entries for a while, you will know that I have experienced less than stellar reliability and performance from the previous internet housing estate, dreamhost. Multiple outages a month, sub-par database performance and random “lets just change shit without warning” events have all lead to the inevitable conclusion - I needed to move.

Thus I made the decision to move to (mt) media temple, something I had pondered doing for some time now. However, as I had registered incoherently.net as part of the dreamhost deal, I couldn’t move it as well. This forced me to ponder just what I wanted to convey through the blog.. Given I am inclined to “lay the smack down” on occasion, and regularly refer to geek-fu related topics, it made sense to incorporate that into a name - smackfoo is the result.

Summation.

There’s a lot more stuff about the theme goals, design ideals and where I wanted to take this blog to cover, as this weekend has been hectic, to say the least - however for now I shall simply let this all soak in. Any questions? :)