After one week of working on several drafts, I decided it was time for a release of version 0.1. I wont give this release a full version number (e.g. 1.0) yet because there is still lots of fine tuning needed.

I started off with a simple HTML layout based on CSS. Like many others (I presume) I had only worked with tables for designing layouts, so CSS was a real revelation. I’ll never go back to using tables, really. After the first few days decided I wanted a more dynamic content management system, which pure HTML can’t offer (at least not when I code it). I chose WordPress for that. I lost about a day trying to work out its structure, mainly by reverse engineering the default theme and heavily modifying it to suit my needs. I never worked with PHP before and knew nothing about it so this proved to be quite a challenge – but I’m happy with the results so far.

The graphics have gone through three major overhauls during this one week, the current version is what I finally came up with today. I might change it again though, depending on wether or not I can still bear to watch it tomorrow.

For the next update I’m gonna try to get the structure of the subcategories sorted, along with uploading some content. I’m still not perfectly happy with using HTML for those pages – it’s not very convenient to update and I’m not sure if I want to go through that every time something changes in those categories. Other fixes will involve a consistent hyperlink design, some changes in font size here and there and maybe a restructuring of the sidebar.

Thanks go out to Mr. Fukai for advising me of the possibilities inherent in CSS, to the Lavazza coffee company for helping to keep me awake, and to my sweet girlfriend for reminding me of the fact that humans need to sleep in order to keep up the creative flow. 😉

So long!