eriktrips

here's something for anyone who has ever done web design: this template phenomenon. unless you have two different departments working on the front and back ends of the site, I fail to see how templates do more than make you type the layout for a page twice: once for the template and once for the script that fills in the template.

granted, you can use one template with more than one script, but you still end up with a bunch of ugly template-filling code in each script that could be replaced by integrated html that otherwise would be on the template.

it just seems like too much work to me and I think I am about to change everything to non-template design and although that, too will be extra work, it will result in less server overhead now and a different approach for later so that I don't have to try to decide what should be templated and what not and where and how you can interleave php with them, which is difficult.

I just don't quite see the point in templates if you are working alone. can anyone enlighten me?

I think I am entitled to be pleased with myself for this and I have to say it looks so much better on a mac it is really really sad for you windoze folks. I mean it looks ok on windoze and everything lines up where it is supposed to be--oh shit. I haven't tried internet explorer yet. hold on.

well explorer almost gets it right. it doesn't read top margins correctly so the little thing I'm trying to do with the lines there in the upper right corner doesn't come off but switch to firefox if you want to see it the way it's supposed to look. I can't believe anyone still uses explorer anyway. but if you want to really see it, borrow someone's powerbook. or macbook pro, if you know someone whose credit cards still work.

I am going to try to sell my blog to the rhetoric department. that is I'm going to try to convince them to use what I've written as a publishing platform for their pedagogy website rather than movabletype, which is more complicated than it needs to be for what we want to do. I just have to figure out a couple more things and I think it'd work really well.

we'll see what the powers that be say.

just passing on more evidence that we need a leader and soon.