Another site.

When Andrew heard and subsequently saw me working on this site, he asked “Why?” A good question indeed. Why another site when I have a few as it is? I tend to shuffle things around to some degree. Part of it is pure fancy and desire and another part of it has to be a search for some kind of balance. Also, holding onto domains, blurs the line between what I do with them and what I want to do with them.

My first domain, Absenter has undergone a few transformations and variations over 7 years. First, a regular journal or blog, then with the demise of a photo journal site I had called Boochakanan, it became a photo journal itself and then re-invented itself as a cycling journal. To which end, I’m content with.

Weightshift has always been where my body of work resides. I added MEMO a few years ago originally as a weblog about design and general ephemera, but never got into a good enough groove. To be a good writer, you have to be talented in that regard. To be at least semi-decent, you have to have discipline. Lacking both for MEMO, I’ve since made it a place to visually experiment.

I’m a sucker for singular domains. I’ve owned this one for a while where I briefly had a few photos up, as I was testing out some Flash for a client. Sites and redesigns for me, serve as testing beds or proof-of-concepts for clients or other work that I’m interested in. This site is another iteration of that but I also wanted to pull together a relatively normal and straightforward place for me to just write whatever I wanted to write.

The original tagline for the site or descriptor read, “Design, photography &c.” After explaining to him that it wasn’t just going to be that, he suggested “Naz Hamid on the Internet.” It covered all the basics and was broad enough and served as both a literal meaning and the subject at hand. Andrew’s good like that. Smart fella.

The site is very grid-dy. I’ve been using grids for a while now — ever since I worked with Khoi Vinh on a few Behavior projects a few years ago and he introduced them to me, I’ve used them ever since. Khoi’s the closest thing to a design mentor that I’ve ever had and for that I’m grateful. Merci beaucoup, sir. When he too, heard that I was doing another site and saw it, he suggested that at some point, I should pull together a slideshow of all the designs and redesigns and iterations I’ve done as it’d be fun to see. I’d like to do that at some point.

The topography element in the background has been one I’ve always liked. I like maps. Especially topographical ones. I’ve used them as design elements in previous versions of Absenter and I’ve missed them but here they are on a larger scale.

List, on the right and in its own section is just a linklist or sideblog or whatever little brief commentary with links are called these days and are a continuation of a little collaborative site I used to have fun with called list.absenter.org. Which was the same thing.

Another strong factor for this site was to go even further with what I could do with Textpattern. While I’m very intimate with Movable Type (from years of working with it on Gapers Block) and have been using Expression Engine for clients, Textpattern’s speed, templating system, URL schemas and logic make the best sense to me for personal websites. This entire site is done in Textpattern. All pages, sections and content is in the system. It’s one of the true complete CMS’s I’ve used to date. It’s extremely powerful but humble in appearance and requires far fewer templates than any of the other CMS’s I know. Entries are powered by one main form that uses a series of IF:ELSE conditionals to output content depending on where you are. Forms, are in Textpattern speak, the snippets of content code that go into a Page (read: layout). You have a separation of the meat of the site from the layout of the site at the template level. Hard to explain per se but here’s a far better explanation to understanding it from Wion Design. It’s powerful stuff. I’m using Textpattern for Cinnamon Cooper‘s new site that’s launching soon and so some of the more complex bits needed a test bed.

So that’s mostly it. It looks passable in IE, though I’m not too concerned with it, truth be told. You really should get Firefox or Safari, both of which are available for PC of course. I actually got cards made up for the site for fun which I’ll have with me at SXSW this year so if you come out to my presentation (a few more details in an upcoming post), I’d gladly give you one (or a Weightshift one, if you prefer).