FREN

Garoo


6 jul. 2005

Splitsville:

The design of my site says something about me — about my tastes, my skills, my strengths, my weaknesses, my stage of life. Just as eight year-old Virginia’s handwriting says, very clearly, “this diary is the work of a precocious ten year-old”, the site aesthetic places its content in a distinct personal-historical context. Even if I maintain an archive of previous designs on my site, I’m unlikely to show the posts in their original design context. [And even] for non-designers — people who choose a blog layout from a list of options — there’s still some value in preserving the fact that a choice was made. “Ah, those posts were written in my Pink Phase.”

That’s a thing I’ve often thought about. And I haven’t found a practical solution — if I had, you could tell. Yet there are cases when it could be done: hypothetical pure-CSS blogs, whose HTML code and scripts really never change at all, could save the reference of the stylesheet each post uses; it would even be so simple for Blogger to record successive layout changes, and display each post or archive page with the appropriate one (of course, it’d take a lot of memory, but that’s something that doesn’t scare Google, isn’t it?).

It gets more complicated with other systems: I think both Wordpress and Dotclear have at least once released updates that weren’t compatible with old templates, and when it comes to Movable Type you’ve got included files and plugins and whatnot that make it highly impractical. And as for homemade systems, such as mine, whose very PHP structure regularly changes… sure, I could save a copy of the final compiled HTML page for each post and monthly archive, and never let my CMS touch it again once the layout has changed, but… but… mmh… well, it’s a shame I never considered this before. There’d be no point in starting now, when my blog’s future is behind it.

You know what would be best? Publishing each post in a separate PDF file. But can only write this now that I’m on a Mac, free of the Acrobat Reader atrocity.

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