Tyler Hunt

As with most blogs and sites on the Internet, this one has gone through several iterations, and tends to get refreshed on a somewhat annual basis, but this time around I’m taking an entirely new approach to the refresh.

As with most blogs and sites on the Internet, this one has gone through several iterations, and tends to get refreshed on a somewhat annual basis. It started with the original manifestations of tylerhunt.com, which had a very primitive homegrown blogging platform, then progressed through a couple different iterations of Movable Type to make the site into a real blog, and the most recently I moved on to a custom blog created more as an exercise in Ruby on Rails than anything else. With each overhaul of the back-end, came with it a new front-end design as well. We’re now approaching the part of the cycle where I step back from a system that I’ve coded myself and into an OTS solution; this time around it’s Mephisto.

I always dread the data migration part of this task, especially when moving away from a schema of my own invention. It went about as well as could be hoped. One of the primary motivators behind the switch was the number of spam comments I had begun to receive, so removing 48,000 comments by handwritten queries took the majority of the time. The data migration is not quite finished yet, as I still have to go through and fix all of the internal links in my posts. I’d like to have the old links redirect, but I’m not sure that the effort spent in doing that would really be worth it; this isn’t a very highly linked to blog.

I’m taking an entirely new approach this time around to the design, however. Instead of doing the entire design upfront, I’m going to start from scratch with no styles, and then style individual elements as I feel inspired. I’ve made the first such change today, with the post dates being the first element to receive some attention. It’s an interesting experiment that I’m looking forward to continuing, and it might be fun for some readers to follow, as well.