New Blog

It's about time! This blog has been inactive for month now, but I've been working on this new version that not only refresh the overall website, but also brings a new language: english !

The previous version of this website was very different from this one. More like a standard website, there was a 'Portfolio' section, 'News', 'Links'... but most of these pages never got filled up with content. With the update of the site, all these sections are now gone. But it doesn't mean that I won't ever have a portfolio somewhere on the web. Somewhere, yes, but not here. I decided to separate my blog from my work environment to not only keep this blog as simple as possible, but also to allow me to write fuck shit poo without interfering with my professional life.

Now On Drupal

I went from  BLOGGER to DRUPAL. Blogger is a blogging system from Google that is fairly effective if you don't really want to have a complicated blog. But as my job is to design and theme drupal sites, it was kinda weird that my own blog is not even on Drupal. Now it is. For those who already feel like leaving because all that talk about systems and drupal sounds very complicated, I would tell them : you're right. It is fairly complicated, but where I work, we try to make it simpler. And just that is really complicated. Drupal is a big set of files that you can download for free and that works kinda Wordpress for those of you who know it. Once downloaded, you have to install it, and once you installed it, it's like a windows XP... or more like a Mac OsX to manage your website. You want to add a new page ? Just click on 'Add a page', fill the text boxes, and submit. Done. Drupal is extremely extensible so you can basically do whatever you want with it. A lot of websites use drupal now, and some of them are so customized that it's hard to even recognize it.

I work on Drupal since now two years, and it's addicting. Especially because a huge community grow around the project and everyone can contribute to it in his own way. For example, as I'm a designer,  I create themes that Drupal users can download and install for free on their website. I contributed 5 themes so far :

• Abarre
• Basic (now in version 2)
• Moleskine
• A Block
• Painted Wall

Each of these is free. That's right, I worked hard on them for absolutely no money back. And that's how Drupal works, it's all Open Source, so not only you can download and use everything for free, but you can also modify the very core of it and make it your own.

It is sometimes hard to understand why some like me would invest so much time into something that will not make any money. But to understand, you have to remember that it works as a community. If a lot of people contribute to Drupal, a lot will use it. If a lot of people use Drupal, it gains in popularity, and the amount of potential clients that would request the expertise that I gained while developing these themes get bigger too. Also, these themes are a little bit like a portfolio on Drupal.org, a website that is seen by a lot of people each month.

Anyway, my point was to say that I'm not using Blogger anymore, but Drupal, and that I build everything on my own... or almost everything. I would like to thank those who helped me building the new couzinhub.com : Katherine Bailey and her amazing Jquery, Steve Krueger and his magic PHP, and Paschal Ssemaganda for kicking my ass when I need it... it's always good to have someone to kick your ass every once in a while.

Few notes about the new CouzinHub.com

 So what's new here ? First of all, the general concept is different. The previous site was very standard, but this one is totally dedicated to the content. The idea is that if you come here, it's to read, so my main work should be to make the reading experience as easy and enjoyable as possible. One word : readability. That's why I decided to have a one column layout, with no sidebar... or at least, only if you need it. The sidebar is hidden by default, and only appear when you click on the little search icon (top right). It is only dedicated to search previous posts. I also decided to use a bigger font than most of the websites out here. I sometimes feel like websites tend to use smaller and smaller fonts, and that it gets very hard to read. So not only I use a bigger, wider font, but I also made sure it degrades of when the text is re-sized.

Also  tried to improve the browsing of the site. Something I never really understood, and I remember that from the first time I tried to read blogs, is that the posts are usually archived by month... Why ? What makes a month a good wrapper for a set of posts ? Why group a post written on the week end about restaurant and a post written on monday about internet ? I understand that it's an easy and fast way to just reduce the length of the list, but this system never helped my find a specific post when I need to... even in my own blog! So I decided to rely on few things : chronology, listing, and keyword. First of all, each post has a 'previous / next' link to quickly browse the chronology of the posts. If this is not fast enough, and you want to have a larger overview of the posts, you can have a list of all posts by title by just clicking on the list icon of the left menu (this is not really useful for the english posts for now, as this is the first one...). And if you want to find a post by its content, just type the keyword in the search box of the collapsible sidebar, it's ajax, and very fast.

I also worked on some other details of the UI, like the comments. I always found the comment form annoying and ugly. So I decided to use the very smart Facebox system. I hope you'll like it, because even if you don't, I won't remove it, I'm the boss here!

And finally, I implemented the new english section that you are reading right now. I'm french, but in an english speaking country, so after a while, it felt weird to only blog in french... BUT, it doesn't mean that ALL post will be in both languages. Some will, some won't, and there's no rule, just me feeling like it or not.

I think that is pretty much it for the new features and concepts. I will explain more in depth some specific details about this website in future posts. In the meantime, I'll be happy to read your comments, and for the shy ones, you ca use the CONTACT page.

Cheers !

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