Web Development by Alistair Robinson

I am the black sheep of my flock,
I stand alone at field’s edge.
Out here my waking hours I spend,
Chewing a hole in the hedge.
I am the outcast of this flock.
When you are gathered together,
I spend my days tied up by a rope,
Seeking an end to my tether.

Black sheep, baa baa baa
etc.

I’m reminded of these lines, from Julian Cope’s “Black Sheep Song,” because my blog has been the black sheep of the family around here, sitting around within my site but with a completely different style and lacking a common navigation which might let people know they were actually on the alistairrobinson.co.uk site.

Well now it has returned to the flock: I turned my alistairrobinson.co.uk style into a Wordpress theme, so now it’s integral. Wordpress is a pleasure to work with, and though I’ve seen some criticism of the code – and it does seem old-fashioned in some ways – I think it does a great job, allowing any extent of customization but with a strong framework that makes it easy to change a bit here, change a bit there.

In doing this work it’s become apparent how useful Wordpress will be as a straight content management system, ie., not just for blogs. That’s something I didn’t really understand until now: why would you want to hack together a site with blogging software instead of using something specifically designed as a CMS? I wondered. Well, I’m about to try both in anger: Wordpress as a CMS vs MODx, which is a real CMS. First impressions are that MODx seems a bit clunky, and maybe too high-level for development, but it’s too early to tell.

And some more lyricism now, this time a poem by Ted Hughes, one of the few poets I’ve been able to appreciate. Lately I’ve been visiting my parents at their new house a few miles south of Jedburgh in the Scottish Borders, after hunkering down amongst the cobbles and sandstone of Edinburgh for months, and my feelings of attachment to the British countryside have been re-awakened. Surrounded by noisy owls in towering oak trees, chilled by the wind, watching a golden moonrise through dark, fast-moving clouds, I couldn’t imagine how I might put my feelings into words.

This poem’s called October Dawn but much of it, to me, is more suggestive of November (which neatly skirts my slow topicality)

October Dawn by Ted Hughes

October is marigold, and yet
A glass half full of wine left out

To the dark heaven all night, by dawn
Has dreamed a premonition

Of ice across its eye as if
The ice-age had begun its heave.

The lawn overtrodden and strewn
From the night before, and the whistling green

Shrubbery are doomed. Ice
Has got its spearhead into place.

First a skin, delicately here
Restraining a ripple from the air;

Soon plate and rivet on pond and brook;
Then tons of chain and massive lock

To hold rivers. Then, sound by sight
Will Mammoth and Sabre-tooth celebrate

Reunion while a fist of cold
Squeezes the fire at the core of the world,

Squeezes the fire at the core of the heart,
And now it is about to start.

Tags: autumn, blogging, cms, content management, countryside, dawn, MODx, october, poetry, scotland, ted hughes, web design, web development, wordpress
Posted in aesthetics, books, nature and animals, web development | 1 Comment »