Greatly Exaggerated

Here’s what happens sometimes: you try your hand at blogging. You get kind of good at it and get on a roll for, oh, six or seven years. You start getting more enterprising with your blogging, maybe even launching a second or third blog, and you start to upgrade your blog software, with plans to make everything faster, better. It all looks like it’s going to be great. You’re unstoppable.

Then you get incredibly busy at work. Ridiculously busy. And then maybe you meet a really awesome new person, and you rearrange most all of the priorities governing your free time. And then you and your new girlfriend even decide to shack up, get an awesome new place and make a happy little home together. Then you spend several weekends in a row packing, then moving, then unpacking and setting up the new apartment and making runs to Ikea and Home Depot.

The Best Laid-out Blogs…

Meanwhile, work doesn’t get any less busy at all. It really doesn’t. Haltingly at first, then more abruptly, your various blogging ambitions run aground. Before you know it, you haven’t posted to your blog — any of your blogs — in a long time. Like, months. People you know send you emails to ask you if you’re okay. People you don’t know leave comments on your blog wondering if you’re dead and if so can they buy your domain?

All of this happened to me, folks. Pretty much.

But I’m back. I really am. And I’m finally, finally running this Web site with the help of the amazing ExpressionEngine. And all thanks in no small part to the incredible, invaluable, indefatigable help of my friend Adam Khan, without whom this site would have been absolutely impossible. He made it happen, folks. I just provided the delays.

Superficially, things might not look all that different, but under the hood they’re pretty dramatically reworked. Adam helped me make some pretty major changes, and I’ll write more about that process and those decisions — and my experience with ExpressionEngine — in future posts. For now though, suffice it to say that things are going to be really rough around here for a while.

So I beg your indulgence for every untidy, untended detail you might encounter. There are lots of little corners throughout that need care and attention — like the glutton for tedium that I am, I’ve saddled this site with disproportionately more templates and interface details than really make sense for a personal blog. Still, I intend to get them all taken care of soon. Or someday. Just not today. For now, I just wanted to get up and running — and blogging again.

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28 Comments

  7. Adrian

    I’m glad that you started blogging again, though don’t forget to take care of the RSS feed also – seems that EE does some crazy things around there.

    Lots of luck!

  10. Balaji Dutt

    I see Adam has mentioned the RSS problems already – wall-to-wall text with no line breaks is pretty hard to grok I have to say.

    Congrats on the (re)launch!

  11. Balaji Dutt

    Um also just noticed this on the site – all text starting from the link to the Weblogs Category upto the link for Expression Engine is getting formatted as one giant link – missing a closing tag perhaps?

  12. Adam Khan

    > all text starting from the link to the Weblogs Category upto the link for Expression Engine is getting formatted as one giant link – missing a closing tag perhaps?

    Fixed. Well spotted. Categories are displayed in a loop with a backspace parameter that was set at 2 and should’ve been at 1 character.

  13. Rick Curran

    That’s funny, I was just thinking the last couple of days that perhaps I’d somehow managed to lose your RSS feed from my list of feeds during my recent switch to using Netnewswire! I realised I hadn’t read anything by you in a while!

  18. Khoi Vinh

    Thanks for the welcome back, everyone. I really feel like I didn’t do much to deserve it except slack off on this blog for too long.

    Thanks also for everyone who pointed out that my RSS feeds were all FUBAR. I think I’ve fixed the problem, so the feeds should look better now if you want to check again.

    UPDATE: Still working on that feed problem. Sorry folks, I’ll let you know when it’s done.

  19. Joe Bligh

    Nice job (Y)

    Just one question: I see you have re-designed the archives page, with boxes for older months under the ‘Archives by Date’ column, but I’ve noticed that this doesn’t fit with your eight-column grid layout. Should this not be four boxes per row instead of three, because if you compare the boxes with the navigation at the top, they should align but they don’t.

    But apart from that, this is pretty emaculate, as usual!

  20. Joey Pfeifer

    Also: Now that your blog posts and links are grouped together, it’s somewhat difficult to differentiate between the two. Maybe you could make your blog post titles bigger?

  21. gleek

    nice job! i love EE. it’s a great platform and i’ve now been able to use it on two different projects and it’s worked great for both. welcome back!

    and cool to hear about the move and the GF too. it’s nice when personal and professional parts of our lives mesh well!

  26. Brock G. McClung

    Dude, I just found out about your blog today. Your humor is on point and your site is amazing. I guess I will join everyone in congratulating you on your re-launch. Continued success to you, Khoi. I am a subscriber.

  28. Alex Kay

    I know far too well, Khoi, about the “too many templates”… Well, that’s just life once in a while 🙂

    Congratulations on your job and the girl and now also the *new* blog.

    Looking forward to hearing more from you, and more about the EE process!

    Alex

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