Behind the Scenes: The Botched Blog

Do we really need another blog?

Of course not, but that’s not the point. So why do I do this to myself, anyway? Perhaps in building this I’ll be just a little closer to the answer. Perhaps not.

I’ve owned the botched.com domain for nearly ten years now. I registered with a small hosting company in Santa Cruz back before I knew anything about putting up a web page. I sat myself down with a copy of a little application from some folks at GoLive and started trying to teach myself how to build a web site. And it appears I’m still trying.

The impetus for the new incarnation of this site came out of a few concepts. I wanted to learn more CSS, so I decided on an all CSS-styled site. I wanted also to try my hand at designing for web standards-something I had hereto for completely ignored in building my sites in the past. Greater than these notions, however, was the desire to build for myself some sort of central repository for my various creative endeavors… a kind of ever-evolving document of a journey in progress. (Naryan describes his site, etherfarm, as his”…defacto prosthetic memory”, which is just perfect) With the new botched.com I wanted a place where I could dump my illustrations, paintings, drawings, writings, ramblings, noises, or whatever…

That’s all well and good, and as an idea that lived in nowhere outside my head, it did just fine. Enter Expression,

A few years back I became absolutely fascinated with back end content management systems and blogging-type tools. I experimented quite a bit with Pivot, building several sites around its open-source php framework. Pivot rocks, but as a free piece of software it has its limitations. I stumbled upon pMachine’s Expression Engine and was quite impressed with its functionality and flexibility, especially having and integrated photo gallery module and the ability to set up custom entry fields. I dove in and set about learning yet another new templating system.

So I had the concept and I had the tool, but still no site. That’s the trick with personal projects, right? No deadlines. Enter the Expression Engine Shootout. pMachine announced a contest for Expression Engine-—powered Sites at the end of January, giving me roughly a month to get my site together. So off I went. A week or so went by and I had myself a nice collection of incoherent doodles and scribbles, but those gave way to some slightly more developed photoshop sketches. In tandem with these explorations I started throwing together a few CSS recipies. With the help of a handful of web design and CSS related sites* I was able to get these to a fairly palatable state-and managed to add a few more items to my digital bag of tricks along the way.

The final design the Botched Blog evolved from all of these excursions. I new I wanted a tactile, textural feel, so I recycled an old worn paper texture I had created for a previous project. The color pallet turned earthen and warm, and I began incorporating various classic-looking ornaments and accents, distressing them to give them a worn and weathered feeling.

On to the implementation.

By no stretch of the imagination and I a programmer of any sort-I know just enough to code my way into a heap of trouble. I found Expression Engine’s templating system pretty straightforward under dissection, and was soon up to my eyes in EE tags and XHTML. (I started design for XTHML strict… but depending on the wind, this site may or may not validate). Before long I had a fully functioning site; functional, but no content.

Guess I’d better get writing—or drawing, or something.

The following abreviated list of sites provided valuable information, inspiration, and/or welcome distractions during the creation of The Botched Blog.

• A List Apart
• Stop Design
• CSS Zen Garden
• Etherfarm
• Stylegala
• Authentic Boredom
• Zeldman