Welcome to the new oBeattie, the personal blog of Oliver Beattie, which celebrates its very first birthday. A lot has happened in a year, and I can honestly say that I have enjoyed every single minute of it. Considering that over two thirds of blogs are estimated to be abandoned, I think we're doing well!

Before I started this blog, I had never before heard of semantic, clean, accessible web design - nor had I ever used CSS-based design (as opposed to table-based methods). In fact, the extent of my web design past back then went no further than a few sites built in FrontPage (I know, terrible isn't it?)

Since December 2005, the blog has grown from humble beginnings in WordPress and a standard template, to a custom-built CMS built on the amazing Django framework. As you can imagine, an awful lot of work has gone into making the site as engaging and unique as possible; so let's find out a bit about our past, before we can get onto the present (and future).

Theorem

This was my first 'big' project with oBeattie. It was the first time I was let loose in a world of modern web design. It was the first time I had ever touched a stylesheet. It was the first time I had ever felt the urge to do something a bit more than the norm with my site.

Theorem was a simplistic theme - a two-column affair with a strong focus on content, rather than cluttering the page with the 'design'. Soon after its release, I packaged it up as a freely available WordPress theme, so that any blog owner wanting to use it could do so. Since its release, over 2000 bloggers have downloaded and activated Theorem on their sites - not too shabby.

Radical

The second incarnation of oBeattie, dubbed 'Radical', was my answer to the growing voice inside me wanting to make the site feel more 'me'. Paint spatter, bright colors and more content centered about more stuff which I do - all contributed to this major update to the blog.

To start off, basic integration was included with Magnolia, Digg and Flickr were all included, provided by PHP, RSS feeds and Flickr's API. Though this was not the perfect solution to the problem of displaying data from various sources on the site, it served its purpose.

Next, Radical made it possible to have live search. This is something which I would have liked to integrate into the Django version of the site, but time constraints forced me to leave it out in the launch version.

I plan to wrap up Radical in the coming months and make it available in a free download in soon to come 'Downloads' section of the site - so look out!

The Switch

This started after a few months of working with WordPress looking more and more like something which I would do. WordPress was fantastic in many ways - and it is a great platform for bloggers looking for a blog, and nothing more. However, I did want more out of my site - which is why I took the decision in early November 2006 to move my whole site over to the Python Web Framework (for perfectionists with deadlines), Django.

Working with Django was one of the best things I have ever done. Not only did I gain an insight into the world of Python, but I was able to build this whole blog in a VERY short timeframe - with all the customisations which I longed for with WordPress. Now, I could do Flickr and Magnolia integration properly - with full archives of all my photos, links, and faves! Working with Django was utter freedom. Want to make a new section? Give me 5 minutes and I will have the admin interface working to start entering data. Give me another hour or so and the whole thing will be working.

So, a new design was dreamed up to go in tandem with the back-end update. Building on what I had learned from Radical, and retaining some of the design elements (recognise the spatter from anywhere?), the new design was a more grown-up version of what I already had. Doing away with the colors which were TOO bright in favour of a more readable, more friendly design seemed like a no-brainer.

What's next

To be honest, I'm not too sure myself! In the next update, expect to see more web servives integrated (a-hem), so that the place will become more of the online representation of me. Expect to see more cool designs, and most importantly, expect to see the site grow up with me. I think this design was a big step towards this - but as I'm a perfectionist, and an addict - this site will never be finished. In my eyes, nothing I create will ever be done, as nothing I ever create could possibly be prefect. But that doesn't stop me from trying hard!