Upgrading kintespace.com to HTML 5!

Yes, in spite of the apocalyptic unpleasantness going on in my freaking life, it’s exciting to finally “re-launch” kintespace.com! The process started in full force over the last four days. As of this writing the Blog site you are reading from today (7/14) and the kinté hits page are not upgraded. Before I get to my usual not-so-feel-good self-critiquing behavior, let’s lead with the impressive accomplishments:

• No more YUI! Now kintespace.com runs on jQuery, Underscore JS, Knockout JS and other JavaScript things that were not around in the year 2000.

• Now, with MVVM! Because of my use of Knockout JS, kintespace.com is designed using the same pattern governing WPF and Silverlight, MVVM. This is why I called my little company Songhay System—instead of “systems”—as I’m (finally) using a unified design system of approaching diverse user experiences on various hardware systems.

• Now, with an actual grid system! Now kintespace.com actually uses a CSS grid system (and an improved color theory—more on this later). I have not liked the way kintespace.com looked for years—now it’s much better… almost there.Now the self-critique stuff (I’m very hard on myself, kids)… The leading ‘failure’ surrounding the context of this ‘upgrade’ is the terrible fact that I never used the last design as a kind of skinning or theming platform such that kintespace.com could playfully change look and feel at ease. It follows that the ‘upgrade’ replaced almost everything built since the year 2000. The only thing that remains relatively unchanged and relatively flexible is the SQL Server database backing the pages kintespace.com (offline, of course). Other “bad” stuff:

• No more Amazon Affiliate cash! Somewhat apocalyptic…

• No more Google “AdSense”: not much return on investment for non-standard HTML.

• No more Google Search API stuff. I’m likely to allow search from the WordPress Blog for kintespace.com (previously, I thought a third-party search API could replace WordPress search—wrong!).

• My backend, offline gang of CMS tools did a decent job but there is plenty of room for improvement.

• Most of my time spent over the last few days was editing markup in database ‘fragments’ used to generate the static HTML that is kintespace.com.

• Internet Explorer 9.0.1 has serious trouble with “tearing” background images with scrolling blocks with background transparency.

• My SEO skills are terribly out of date. My meta name tags are all screwed up.

• No more multiple JavaScript files artificially inflating hits data! My JavaScript platform comes minimized and concatenated.These notes are far from complete. But no time for grooming this today…

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