After seven long months in development, Undefined Fire v4 is finally here. I have to apologise for the long delay but to be completely honest I had lost 100% of my motivation to continue website development, even though I wanted to get it out sooner I just couldn’t open my editor.
With all major version releases of the site there is a design and back-end change. As I’m a spontaneous designer I can’t really make any comments on why I designed the site the way it is as I completely threw away my plan a few hours after I started creating the mock-up in The GIMP (Yes, I’ve finally decided to move to free software, however it was not a smooth transition and I’ll be outlining the reasons why in a future post). Usability-wise I’ve tried to address the common problems with general blogs and personal websites by adding different graphical emphasis to different parts of each article as well as adding a lot more links between pages on the site.
“Using a DRY programming philosophy with the object-orientated Python language rewriting the entire site from scratch went quickly and smoothly.”
On the back-end site of things I’ve thrown out all my ugly PHP and carefully replaced it with beautiful Django code. I have to say that as soon as I saw Django I was in love as everything just made sense. Using a DRY programming philosophy with the object-orientated Python language rewriting the entire site from scratch went quickly and smoothly. Django’s built-in admin panel was just icing on the cake, no longer do I need to spend half my time writing pages that only I will see. There was a slight problem with the first revision of Undefined Fire v4 as the article section and code library (Which I merged with the article section in the second revision) required recursion-compatible code. As Django does not support this out-of-the-box I ended up writing a stupidly simple template tag that did it all for me. After doing a quick Google search it looks like Django still doesn’t really support it (This looks interesting though) so I’ll release the tag sometime in the near future.
Well I guess that’s it for now, I hope this post has brought happiness to those select few that still have me in their feed readers (My daily visits have dropped to almost nothing due to my inactivity). I will be doing a lot more non-website software development and electronic design this year than in the past so hopefully I’ll have more to write about. One of the other main reasons why I never posted anything last year was because everything I decided to write about was already described adequately on other sites. Oh well, I guess I need to compete with others to get up in the world. Time to go start researching my next article, have fun mates!
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