I seem to have a habit of making major changes to the focus of the various websites that I manage for myself. This time around I even launched a brand new one, ryanboswell.com.
Let’s take it from the top. About two months ago I was inspired to do a major overhaul of my website, Ambit-Online.net, after watching similar things be done by various people that I follow. The overhaul would include separating my personal identity from the Ambit-Online.net domain proper and move it to a brand new domain name (at this point I had not settled on the name, but ideas were swirling about). Ambit-Online.net would then be centered on my professional life online. I had done similar things in the past, but nothing quite to the extent of this. For the first two weeks I laid everything out on paper, what exactly would exist on the two domains, and would I possibly need a third (ultimately I did restrict it to two domains for the time being, more on this later). My blog, photography, about me, and all things that were not related to my work life would be moved to what later became ryanboswell.com. My online portfolio would remain on ambit-online.net and so would my tribute to BeachNet. The portfolio would be redesigned and placed under the name of Ambit Studios (the name that I have been using with my clients for years, but not generally in public). The tribute to BeachNet would be left as is, and would remain on the ambit-online.net domain until I can acquire the original bnet.org domain.
Now that I had the plan, it was time to put it into action. Since I currently was using MovableType to manage just about every part of the current ambit-online.net site I decided it would be easiest to keep it that way when I transfered half of the site to the new domain. I then began the long process of designing and redesigning ryanboswell.com and the new Ambit Studios. Both underwent about two completely different designs before getting their current looks. At the moment Ambit Studios is unavailable to the public (due to a last minute problem I had with the site that is causing a slight delay in the launch) so you can’t see the design yet. I do shamelessly admit that I drew a lot of inspiration for the design of ryanboswell.com from Glenn Wolsey, although honest 95% of the template and CSS code is mine.
So, that’s a nice summary of what I’ve been up to for the past two months. And now a few quick notes about the site as it is. First, it’s technically not finished yet. You might have noticed that while each post has a nice list of it’s tags, but they’re not links. The reason for this is that the current stable version of MovableType does not support server side includes on CGI generated pages, so the tag search pages come out messed up. Luckily, the next version has such a feature, so as soon as it is released as stable (they released beta 5 a few days ago) I’ll upgrade and add in that functionality. At such time I’ll also add a tag list to the left-most sidebar.