I have put together a new design for fufurasu.org, to coincide with my new beginning in London and coming out of hiatus. I feel this particular redesign warrants a few words of commentary, seeing as it represents a departure from the previous configuration of the site in two important ways.

Firstly, it was time to move away from doteasy who have hosted this site for several years without fail. Their free hosting service is still unrivaled as far as I’m concerned (and highly recommended), but their premium offerings are facing severe competition from bloggers’ darling DreamHost. DreamHost’s prices, features, and attitude are irresistible and — never one to turn down temptation — I dove into that sweet hosting goodness head-first. I am very happy with them so far.

Secondly, moving hosts meant that I would have to reinstall the blogging software and configure the new server from scratch. This got me thinking. Following Six Apart’s decision to start charging for Movable Type 3, the previouly free blogging software that I had been using for this site, and in the face of increasing dissatisfaction with the perceived clunkiness of MT and its inability to deal effectively with comment spam, I started considering new options for blogging software. Now, if you have looked at this space recently, you will have found that is saturated with competing packages, all of which suffer from bloated feature sets and headache-inducing complexity. I am so averse to that kind of thing that I briefly toyed with the idea of using an overly simplistic solution like BITcom Xblog. I then dared to contemplate coding my own blogging system from scratch using Ruby on Rails before snapping back to the real world. I finally settled on taking a machette to the jungle of complexity that is WordPress, ultimately an obvious choice as it is being developed openly and actively (and it looks pretty).

For months prior to the change-over I pored over the problem of simplifying the structure of a blog. I filled countless Moleskine pages with doodles. I compiled list after list of all the information my blog should contain, distilling it and reducing it each time. Then, with some last minute inspiration from the outstanding two point three and Maniacal Rage, I started removing features from WordPress templates. Out went extended entries, excerpts, multiple authors, pingbacks, trackbacks, sidebars, blogrolls, categories, and archives. I also decided to forego all the usual detritus of blog design: buttons advertising XHTML and CSS validity, “powered by” and “hosted by” courtesy links on the front page, copyright notices, recent entries and recent comments lists, secondary link blogs, dynamic “currrently listening” features, Amazon links, tag clouds, statistics, and search. Unlike the two sites that served as my inspiration, I kept comments.

Two basic templates remain. The home page has a brief description of the blog, including an email link, and a reverse-chronological list of all entries, dated, with a comment count (implemented as an HTML table, because it is a table). Clicking on one of the entry titles brings you to the second template, which displays the individual entry, its comments, and a comment form. Navigation to the previous and next entries is also provided. There is still a copyright notice, in the form of a Creative Commons license in the source. There is also an RSS feed; it is linked in the correct way in the source, allowing Safari and Firefox to display a feed button (aggregators can also discover the feed automatically). I am considering reinstating search after looking at the wonderful AJAX-based search implementation on Maniacal Rage, as it would be useful to have it on my custom 404 error pages (especially since the new system disabled all existing links to fufurasu entries). But everything else is foofaraw.

The WordPress theme that implements these changes, tentatively called Wabi-sabi, is still being tinkered with, but I am satisfied with the results so far. I would be happy to release it, once I have abstracted the code further and provided somebody thinks the theme is worth sharing. You like?