Thaddeus.net Blog

I recently needed to make some updates to Thaddeus.net and got frustrated by the hassle of FTPing into my server and editing the HTML by hand for a simple update. A month ago, I started playing with Symphony CMS for my hobby site and grew to like the approach. So, I decided that it would be worth doing a bit of an overhaul on Thaddeus.net to make my life easier and keep learning in the process.

Symphony is an interesting approach to a CMS. Every page that you edit is actually driven in the back-end by an XSLT. That means that you're never really editing code and it forces you into syntactically correct web pages. It also means that it will play nicely with external feeds like RSS or XML from an API. There's a bit of a learning curve associated with it, especially if you have never worked with XSLT before, but the benefits may make it worth it.

I probably could have rewritten this whole site using Ruby on Rails in about a third of the time that it took me to do it in Symphony, but where's the fun in that? I wanted to learn more XSLT and try something new. One of the benefits is that Symphony provides a very user-friendly back-end for adding and editing entries that RoR scaffolding tries to approximate but doesn't achieve. With Symphony, I just log into the back-end and I can simply click a button to add the fact that I've become an XSLT guru to my resume. My network links on the home page are right next to my blog posts which are right next to my resume entries. One admin to rule them all.

It's also simpler to not have to maintain a separate blog engine. I used to use WordPress for my blog and was always frustrated by the fact that I constantly needed to upgrade various plugins, etc. Now, everything is consolidated. If a patch comes out for Symphony, it's one install that needs to be managed.

I also have fewer embedding javascripts to deal with. On the old Thaddeus.net the Twitter and Delicious feeds on the home page were actually generated by Javascript JSON requests after the page loaded. Now that's handled in the page template by XSL transforms performed on the respective RSS feeds. The feeds get cached and the result is a much faster loading homepage (but I'm still stuck with the Flickr Flash player).

The end result of this is that Thaddeus.net has gone through yet another upgrade. I think this 9th complete overhaul since first purchasing the domain 12 years ago (wow!). I didn't change the style much this time because I'm actually really happy with the current look and feel, but I've future-proofed it a bit. I'm expecting to get at least another year out of this back-end, hopefully longer.

If you're curious about Symphony CMS, it's definitely worth learning some more and they have fantastic documentation and a very active support community who are very willing to answer questions. Check out their site at symphony-cms.com and start playing.