After some weeks of work –though I only spend 1-2 hours every week on this project– I am re-releasing brain tags. I have lost the count of the version numbers of this blog, but is should probably the 6th or 7th overhaul. I am very excited about it, as I see it as a fresh start with some important changes:
A new CMS
After many, many years, I have exported all data from my old Movable Type Pro installation, and installed a fresh copy of Melody on a fresh new account. For those who are not familiar with those two applications, Melody is a fork Movable Type version 4.
I choose to move to Melody for several reasons. First of all, I was not completely happy with the latest versions of Movable Type, which added a lot of unneeded bloat, such as the possibility to create sites. In fact, Movable Type obliges you to first create a site to be able to create a weblog. But the biggest reason is the fact that support for Movable Type is decreasing, now that the owner is focussed on advertising, and development on Movable Type takes place in Japan.
Melody was created by two former employees of Six Apart –one of them was product manager for Movable Type– and a very active community member. They have already been able to solve a lot of the main issues in Movable Type in Melody, and I simply trust more in them than in the current developers of Movable Type.
A final note on the change: while both Melody and Movable Type can handle multiple blogs and I traditionally have managed all my blogs from a single installation, I am now separating them again. This way I can make my customizations without making my other blogs more complex. It also gives me a way to test out things.
A new theme
Melody comes with a very nice minimalistic theme as the default theme, DePo Clean, and I decided to keep it. For the moment I haven’t personalized the templates, though I did fix some minor bugs in the theme. Once I figure out how to make diff files, I will probably submit the patches to the Melody developers.
I do have a list of wishes and desires for the theme, so don’t be surprised when things change over time.
Comments are disabled
Even though the combined Akismet and Typepad spam filters are very effective, I still had to deal with several comments in the moderation queue every week. Since nowadays there are plenty of other ways to express your opinion, I have disabled the comments function. If you want to share your opinion, feel free to send me a [tweet]6 or mail.
Less images, more text
When importing the old entries, I left out all decorational images. In the last years, I always accompanied each post with an image to make the post more attractive. Those images are now gone, you will only find images which help making my point. I want the focus to be on my words, and will also try to write longer, more thoughtful posts from now on.
I am very excited about this new start. What do you think?
