Building a book site with Wordpress
It probably says something about me that, after completing years of work on my book, one of the things I most looked forward to was…building the Web site for the book. Aside from my work at Salon and my launching of various blogs, it had been years since I built a Web site on my own, and I relished the chance to look around at all the new tools for content management that have emerged in the interim.
But pretty quickly I realized that learning any new tool takes time, and I didn’t have a lot of time. And then I also realized that I’d spent a lot of time last summer learning to use Wordpress as the new platform for my blog, and there was no reason under the sun I couldn’t use Wordpress to build the book site for Dreaming in Code. Wordpress lets you publish static pages; all I had to do was customize some templates, and voila! — blog software without the blog.
I am, as I admit at the start of Dreaming in Code, barely a programmer myself. But I can find my way around a template, I can borrow snippets of code and mess with a system that already works just enough to get it to do what I need it to do. This approach was, once upon a time, called “end-user programming”: the idea of enabling sophisticated users to extend and adapt a powerful piece of software without their needing to master complex programming languages. Spreadsheets depend on end-user programming; back in its day, Hypercard did, too. (Bonnie Nardi’s 1993 book A Small Matter of Programming is a good outline of the concept, focusing on spreadsheets and CAD systems.) A good blogging tool like Wordpress is an invitation to end-user programming. And I admit it: I had fun!
The part that wasn’t fun was wrestling with CSS. I know that CSS achieved a Good Thing in helping Web designers clean up HTML and separate content from presentation and all that. But making a Web site look exactly the way you want it to look was a hell of a lot easier back in the days of tables and simple HTML than it is today. There are still a few elements of my site that aren’t aligned exactly the way I want them; I gave up trying to figure out why — life is too short! CSS was a step forward for designers’ control of their Web work but a step backward for the end-user programming that made the Web what it is today.
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January 4th, 2007 at 1:48 pm
Good luck with the book. I’ve read a very warm review from Joel Spolsky
January 4th, 2007 at 2:41 pm
I got my hands dirty with CSS for the first time last December — and I agree, it’s a mess. :)
Having a good text/CSS editor I was familiar with (emacs — not recommended tho) made things a lot easier. But I’m still aghast that CSS2 doesn’t allow an easy way for users to do nice looking rounded corners. I’ll completely ignore all the hoops you have to jump through to handle IE6 bugs (like the fact it doesn’t handle PNG transparency).
I’m looking forward to reading your book.
January 5th, 2007 at 5:58 am
To each his own. I first dabbled in page building back in the tables and spacer gifs days. It was awful. Things clicked for me when I tried using CSS. I conceptualize it like an old-fashioned text filter: Feed it raw HTML and it transforms the code into something different.
CSS doesn’t move very fast. Who knows if that’s the fault of glacial standards groups arguing about new things or glacial browser developers reluctant to implement the new things.
March 15th, 2007 at 12:12 am
Nice Blog, I’m using toko for content management (it’s a free one)… http://toko-contenteditor.pageil.net