At the tune of the new year and a new decade, I've decided to explore some chanegs here. Several points are behind this:
- Since starting to work more as a software developer and less as an author, I don't have as much free time to work on these sites as I once did, nor is it as obviously relevant to my day job. When I was a full-time author, these sites gave me new ideas and new things to write about. They still do, but I no longer have the time to write about those things.
- Cafe con Leche and Cafe au Lait and are some of the oldest blogs on the Web. In fact, I only know a couple that predate Cafe au Lait. When Cafe au Lait started MySQL wasn't open source, and PHP, XML, and XSLT didn't exist yet. In other words, the technology that powers them is old.
- WordPress helped me rethink a lot of how I suspect a blog site should work from the user interface side. These sites are a lot more automated and well-formed than they used to be; but it's still basically static HTML driven by some client side AppleScript and XSLT run out of cron jobs. I'd like to do better. I considered just porting them to WordPress; but, as nice as the WordPress frontend is, it has some flaws; the most fundamental of which is that it's trying to stuff triangular pegs into rectangular holes.
I don't have a lot of spare time these days; and what I do have is mostly occupied with photography and chasing birds, but I've decided that there's not a lot of point to continuing with this site as it is.
Don't worry though. It's not going away. I'm just going to focus on building a new infrastructure rather than on posting more news. I'm going to dogfood my work right here on Cafe con Leche. (I will keep Cafe au Lait on the old system until I'm happy with the new one.) I've decided to begin by experimenting with bringing the site up on top of existDB. It may go down in flames. It may not work at all. I may have to revert to the old version. It will probably sometimes be unavailable. There will have to be several iterations. But certainly along the way I'll learn a few things about XQuery databases, and just maybe I'll produce something that's more widely useful than a few bits of AppleScript and XSLT. See you on the other side!
