After several versions that never saw the light, the news version of clicktorelease.com is live.

The old site only had a page with all my experiments, projects and commisions; and one tutorial. I had to update it manually, usually editing in a local copy and uploading the modified files, and, sometimes, editing directly on the server.

The new site has better structure: a main page showing blog posts and new code releases, in chronological descending order; a code page with all the different projects I've worked in and my personal experiments, also in chronological order; a blog page with all the entries I had and I'll be doing; and an about page.

I've tried to approach the redesign with two main goals in mind. Firstly, use CSS as much as possible: this way I don't need different bitmap assets to achieve the desired effect (I rather code than crop and slice in Photoshop). Secondly, I wanted the updating of the blog to be as simpler as possible, but powerful and automated at the same time. In the end, I have a small PHP script that iterates over some folders with the raw specifications of each project, blog post, etc. and "bakes" the complete site, in a separate clean folder that can be rsynced with the server.

I'm not a big fan of compiling. In fact, that's what made me fall in love with JavaScript and leave many years of C and C++ behind. I love the fact that I can change a line in the text editor, reload in the browser and everything is updated.

Anyway, this time the site has to be built in order to compose everything, minify the scripts and all that. All in all, it's a good trade off.

I'm not entirely sure who I'm writing this for. I think it's only to test drive the blog system. Oh well. I hope you like it and enjoy it.

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