Dont Trust This Guy why not take my word for it? A blog by Jim Jeffers

If you went to my blog and noticed things were funny or that I’m missing a post you aren’t imagining things. Earlier this week my site got hijacked by some sort of spammer that installed a backdoor in my wordpress install. For a while you could see all of the files on my site including my configuration files tied to the database powering this blog. Bad news.

Read the rest of this entry »

I am growing very VERY VERY tired of wordpress comment spam! Becuase it’s so standardized and widespread it’s an open target to these attacks. Here’s an analogy.. using wordpress instead of a homebaked or less popular blogging system is like using a PC instead of a mac when it comes to viruses! Geez. Oh well this is not meant to be a rant, rather I want suggestions. What do you guys suggest I switch to?

Presently, I’m considering Mephisto. I don’t like wordpress becuase I think it’s too feature rich andheavy weight. I want something lightweight that’s easy for me to hack into and add my own code on. I truly dislike the notion of upgrading. Once I setup a blog the code is hacked apart by myself so much that upgrading just isn’t an option. So what are your thoughts? What do you recommend? Should I just build my own blogging software? Should I try out Mephisto? Are there any other decent CMS systems that are preferabbly Rails based?

If you’re reading this your feedback is required. I’m redesigning my blog by heavily hacking up Squible to the point I probably won’t be able to upgrade past 2.5 alpha. Oh well so be it. Here’s what I’m doing.

The color scheme

I’m trying a salmon (pink) and blue color scheme. I wanted to try something I wouldn’t normally do and I kind of like it even though it creeps me out. Normally I’d just do black and grey so this is a refreshing change.

The header

The header of the page is designed to look like a torn up news paper an there is a live flickr feed that has been styled to resemble polaroid photos. The idea was to make the site resemble a dirty torn up unreliable newspaper to make it even less “trustworthy”.

The content (style)

Overall the site is using serif fonts to resemble a newspaper rather than more screen friendly fonts such as Arial, Verdana, etc. The content is using the less is more approach. There are just some lines and slight background touches to spruce things up a little but but otherwise from that the text is text and nothing more to take your eye away from that fact.

I’m not even close to being done.

I still have to style the interior footers and comments so stay tuned but let me know if you like the direction.

I recently stumbled across another excellent blog. In this case, it’s a blogfolio, showcasing portfolio of work in a blog format, for Ben Sekulowicz-Barclay. I think Ben has don an excellent job keeping it simple and clear. I love the lime green / dark grey / white color scheme but what makes this site really interesting is the fact that there’s no navigation whatsoever. No tags, no category listing, no archive lists. Just content. I really like it because his design makes it work. It only takes a few minutes to realize how easy it is to find anything on his site.

Check it out: Beseku