As I say goodbye to one old friend, I say hello to another, older friend.

I’ve decided to switch my blog back to Wordpress. MODx has served me well, but my site has different requirements now, and Wordpress has proven to be the better candidate.

Is MODx more flexible than Wordpress? Oh, most definitely. Is MODx more powerful. I would say so. So what does Wordpress have that MODx doesn’t? A few small but important things.

First, with MODx, if I want to create a post, I have to find the right folder for it to go into in its document tree. In Wordpress, you just hit “Write”, and you’re off to the races. Maybe you’ll put it in some categories later, maybe you won’t. When you’re done writing, hit “publish”, and the post gets put on your site. That’s it.

Second, the community of developers behind Wordpress is staggering, far greater than MODx. For me, this means that Wordpress has been extended to meet the needs of a larger variety of people, so it’s more likely that someone has already met some particular needs of mine. And in fact, some very specialized needs of mine have been met.

Which leads to my next and final point. With Wordpress, I can write in many different contexts, with many different tools. For example, I installed a plugin called WPhone, which simplifies the WP control panel and allows me to write from my portable device. I also have an application on my Macbook called ecto, which allows me to write and publish new content on my WP site without even opening my site in a browser. This makes it very easy to produce content.

This is something I’ve been wanting with MODx ever since I switched to it. I’m not saying that it’s hard to produce content on MODx; quite the contrary. But it’s far easier with Wordpress, and the easier the better.

I decided to use a free theme called The Morning After. I made this decision because 1) I didn’t want to spend weeks designing another completely custom template, which is what I did for my MODx template, and 2) this theme is positively stunning. I love it.

I’ve moved pretty much everything that was on my old site onto the new site. My photoblog needs a lot of work. All my comic strips are moved over, and I think they look way better in this template, since I can span them across the whole template, instead of constraining them to a single, narrow column. I haven’t moved any of the comments over, but I plan to in time.

Believe me, I’ll still be using MODx for many other sites, most particularly client sites, who need to do more than just write, and who will always have very differing needs for which only a highly flexible framework like MODx will fit the bill. But Wordpress is awesome in its own right. I’ve missed it, and I’m looking forward to using it again.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the new look and feel. And hey, who knows, maybe I’ll write more often.

I know this sort of music may sound strange to most of us westerners, but I want you to listen to something amazing.

After a few seconds, you’ll hear a noise that sounds like some sort of high pitched, dancing flute or whistle. Do you hear that? That is neither a flute or a whistle. The gentlemen on your left is making that sound with the harmonics that are being created as his low, gutteral tones reverberate through his throat and out of his mouth.

I didn’t believe this when I first saw it. But then I started searching Youtube for this sort of throat singing, and found some amazing examples that confirmed, for me, that this is truly what is happening. Like This clip for example; this clip doesn’t allow me to embed it on my site, but go watch it for yourself. The camera man gets very close to the vocalists mouth, and if you listen closely, you can discern how his low tones produce these strange and amazing harmonics. There are some other examples you can find too.

Discovering these subtle cultural gems in music that is foreign to me really helps me to understand and appreciate it. I’m used to a smoothe beat, soothing guitar, a nice bass…you know, jazz, rock. I never understood how anyone could enjoy this sort of music. But now, I must say, this is absolutely amazing.

Your email address, as with any other personal information you submit, will be kept private, and will never be shared with anybody. I’ll probably never send you any email, unless I happen to know you personally. No newsletters, no soliciting, no spam or anything like that.

So anyway, for what it’s worth, if you’re interested, signing up is easy. Besides the links in this article, both the registration and login links are currently located in the upper left corner of the site. If you have problems, just go to the contact page and send me a message.

My plan for this site, from the beginning, was to begin with a very simple approach; with a single article flooding the home page, and virtually nothing else, and very simple, flat, but clean color.

Once the content of the site became more elaborate, a more elaborate design would be required, in both function and visual design, a more fleshed out interface, which would allow everyone to understand what they can find on this site, just by glancing over the home page.

So this design is the result of that plan. I hope you think it was executed effectively.

I’d love to hear your feedback. Although I’m really happy with the final result, I know it’s not perfect. Let me know if you run into any visual or usability problems. You may also notice that a couple of things are missing from the old site; those will be worked in shortly. I also plan to continue the evolutionary process of the design as I find time to enjoy doing so.

In the mean time, enjoy the new interface for what it is.

*Ahem*

Come, she told me, pump-dump-a-dump-dump!

A new dessert to eat, pump-dump-a-dump-dump!

A sweet de-li-ca-cy, pump-dump-a-dump-dump!

To put in my bel-ly,

Pump-dump-a-dump-dump! Dump-a-dump-dump! Dump-a-dump-dump!

It goes down ea-si-ly, pump-dump-a-dump-dump!

And out my rump.

Thank you. No, really, you’re too much. Thank you.

Lately I’ve become increasingly dissatisfied with my host, Dreamhost. On top of the many misfortunes that they seemed to have gone through, they have become very slow, even when they’re stable. I persist to have intermittent trouble with my email, and my website has been up and down, and completely crashed 2-3 weeks ago. I’ve been so busy, I didn’t even have time to fix it until this past weekend, leaving me with a dead site for almost two weeks. In spite of the fact that I prepaid for another year only a few short months ago, I’ll be finding a new server to place my sites on very soon.

The next blog-stopper has been some second thoughts I’ve been having about the system that I’ve built my site on, MODx. This has been my favorite CMS of all time, ever, and it continues to hold that title without the slightest hint of a worthy challenger. However, that’s content management. My site is primarily a blog, and for blogging, Wordpress is a major contender, with numerous features that make blogging easy, and keep the whole content management thing in the background, letting you write and not concern yourself with managing. With MODx, the more posts I create, the more intimidating my long list of content gets. Additionally, hosting comments on your site with Wordpress is a built-in breeze. With MODx, comments have to be installed and configured, and it’s been a real bummer so far. With Wordpress, the system is built for one thing, blogging, and it’s built very well and very simply for that single purpose. With MODx, the options are so infinite that simply making up my mind is a headache.

After all is said and done, however, I’ve decided that MODx is still the right solution for my site. Besides the fact that I’ve already invested countless hours building my site on this system, I’m bound to continue to want to change, shift, and morph my site into whatever suits my fancy at the moment, and only MODx is going to make that easy. Wordpress can be hacked, but it’s not made for that.

Next up is my day-job, at Darling Creative Group, where I serve as the Multimedia Director, primarily building websites and developing complicated online applications for our clients. We are so busy right now that I barely have a spare moment. I love my job, but sometimes my assembly line is so long that I have to stay up working at night and skip lunch just to feel like things are moving forward. This is no good for both my long- and short-term goals, which involve only working from 8-5, and spending a lot of time with my family, including my firstborn son who is due January of next year. This has also, obviously, left me without any time to write to you. I’m just hoping things will calm down a bit soon.

So I’ve found a brief pocket of time here, long enough to drop in and let you know what’s been going on. I plan on doing some degree of writing, more often than I have been in the past months. It may not be anything too terribly deep, but I’ll at least let you know what’s been happening lately, and maybe drop in a line of code or two, or recommend an application.

I hope all is well with everyone out there. Don’t forget to have lots of fun, and stop to take a deep breath every now and then, and maybe have your favorite delectable beverage.

So what do I do now? Have you ever worked so hard on something, and then when you’re done, all that you want to do is do it all over again? Well, with this site, that’s not hypothetical. I’ve built this thing and rebuilt it literally four separate times.

I spent a lot of time considering what back-end I was going to build this site on. At first I built it on Etomite, because it was pretty flexible, and you can easily continue to develop your site after it goes live. After I was done, I got to thinking that Wordpress might be better, because my focus is writing, not developing. After I started to rebuild on Wordpress, I realized that the site structure I had in mind could not be accomodated by Wordpress without a lot of hacking, which would make all of my upgrades a total pain. So I started looking into Moveable Type, because I’ve been curious about it for quite some time, and I’m a sucker for attractive advertising. After playing with MT a bit, I was impressed, especially with their templating system. After I rebuilt my whole site all over again, I realized that I didn’t like their templating system as much as I thought I did, and I became increasingly frustrated with the whole site-rebuilding thing. So I scrapped the third revision and set the site aside for a bit, while I got some other business taken care of and gave my next attempt plenty of consideration and planning.

My final site is built on MODx. MODx is touted (note to self and to world: this word really should be spelled “tauted”, so that it’s not mispronounced and confused with flatulence) as a fork of Etomite…but not by them (actually, they acknowledge the label, but they seem to contest it in semi-silence). The history is longer than I care to get into, but the bottom line is that they have a better product, a better team, and a better future. MODx is a developers’ CMS; you can make it into anything you want it to be, or you can take it for what it is and start creating web pages. As for my focus being writing and not developing: Well, once the site is developed I can just start writing, right? Then again, who am I kidding? I’m a developer; as long as there’s something to fiddle with, I’m going to fiddle with it.

And so here we are. Tilted Symmetry has been my pet project for more than a year now. It was invented when I began to teach some graphic artist friends various tricks and techniques. Two key things occured.

1. I remembered how much I love to teach. I used to teach Art and English at a K-12 college prepatory school. It was one of the most trying and challenging experiences of my life, and I enjoyed connecting with other people and giving them new knowledge and abilities that they didn’t have before.
2. I learned that no matter how many clowns are out there showing the world how to honk their horns, the world can always use another bozo.

At one point, I was talking to someone about the value of imbalance in the midst of balance, and I called it “tilted symmetry”. It was one of those phrases that arose through the course of natural conversation, and I found it profound enough to add a “.com” to the end of it (okay, so I add a “.com” to the end of every slightly profound catch phrase that happens upon the ol’ knoggin; that’s hardly the point, and I’m hurt that you brought it up). I ended up liking it a lot, so I created some branding for it, and then off I went building a web site for it four times over (weeeee).

Tilted Symmetry exists for two main reasons:

1. To provide beginner and semi-professional graphic designers and web developers with tips and pointers for their studies and work.
2. To provide me with a new creative outlet for my writing, photography, illustration, and anything else that suits my fancy.

I hope that you enjoy, and are able to take advantage of, the resources and knowledge that are made available on this new site. If you have any suggestions, critiques, or anything else to offer me, please feel free to leave a comment on any of my articles or journal entries.

And so with that, here goes nothing…