All change (again)

I’m actually going on holiday soon and seem to be getting all sorts done before I go away. The obvious one is the change of scenery around these parts. Let me know what you think. It’s not complete as yet and I have a few more bits to add and check (yes I mean you IE) but I’m all for release early and often.

I’d been meaning to move on a little recently, and the move to textpattern cemented that. I’m still impressed with it and wanted to delve further into setting up flexible forms and pages. I’ve set up a few areas of the site to hopefully make me organise things a little better – specifically an experiments section to play with code and an articles section if I every actually get round to writing something properly. Both appear in the sidebars.

Another reason for the sudden change was, after using ShortStat for quite a while and looking over the Mint information on the haveamint.com site I made the plunge. Some had moaned about the cost but really £17 is the price of a DVD and with a DVD you dont get the sense of supporting a really smart developer. Ok so I could have seemlessly moved from one to the other without a change in the design but I didn’t want to (confuse my database).

I’ll hopefully post a review of sorts (better late than never) as the dicussion doesn’t seem to have died down yet. I’d personally like to see more of this sort of small, clever, personal application development. I’ve been a bit Open Source advocate for a good while which has it’s merits but I’m still of the mind that something as focused and polished as Mint is more likely to come out of one mind. The question is, I guess, about the market? If you’re friends blog to a huge number of other web designers, bloggers and developers then you have an in on the promotional front but will that become the norm rather than a very clever marketing ploy?

Also on the paying part, lots of people thought $30 was quite steep, I disagreed but will we be back to Shareware and people not paying? Lots of questions. Not many answers yet. But should be interesting to see where things go – at least for people like me with an interest in the sociology of software.