Herb v/d Dool Always a work in progress

Why this site. Why here

Yes, that’s a rainbow shooting out of my head

rainbow

There’s a good reason this site is barebones. I’m busy and I can’t always conjure up rainbows and unicorns. But I like it that way too. I aim to keep this very basic since other projects always take up most of my time.

Lately, I’ve been interested in simplifying the process of meeting the needs of our clients. Instead of offering a full-package solution that includes Drupal and CiviCRM, we should be thinking of providing the minimum amount of functionality that meets their needs. I’ve been quite interested in reading how Development Seed, which was a firm heavily involved in Drupal until a couple years ago, ditched Drupal altogether and dived into Github pages and Jekyll. They even started their own user-friendly markdown editor prose.io that connects with your github account (I’m using it right now). This was a major missing piece in moving to a “CMS-free” setup.

For my own work I don’t need anything complex. Flat HTML is fine. I can edit my own images locally. That is partly why I’m now trying out Github pages for my own personal information. I’ve been using markdown for awhile on my other blog, which is run on Drupal.

My previous personal site was little more than a brochure site with a portfolio. The code was getting horribly out of date; security updates piled up. I just don’t need that all. I could have moved it to Drupal Gardens or Wordpress.com but the chance to play with Github pages is too inviting.

Drupal can be quite powerful and we still end up using it for most projects, but clients seldom need everything that it has to offer and it is hard to resist the urge to turn on many features just because it’s possible. When completing user stories we should be open to exploring new ways of completing the functionality with something that doesn’t require a complete technology stack.