Today, my mom is a tumblr user»
Back in February, my mother commissioned me to churn out a redesign for her website to go along with her upcoming book of short stories, set to be released in September. Her former site, also written by myself (back in 2005), was a series of hand-updated html pages. I took this redesign as an opportunity to add some much-needed dynamic content to the site.
Because my mom was a bit intimidated by the prospect of maintaining a conventional blog, I decided to rely on tumblr as the basis for the news section of the site. The prime criterion that led to selecting tumblr over self-hosted lightweight blogging engines, such as Chyrp, was tumblr’s straight-forward dashboard interface. Even my technologically inept mother managed to figure out how to click “Text,” fill out two boxes, and tap “Create Post.”
The rest of the site was hobbled together with jQuery and Simplepie. Simplepie is a goliath of an RSS parser (the single PHP file is a whopping 348 KB), but it was easy to bend to my will for use in a google calender-backed events page. I’m also filtering posts through Smartypants for typographical correctness.
I’ll probably come back to optimize the site further down the line, but for now my client is appeased, and I’m sleepy.
