OK so, a few years ago I created this blog, searching for editorial guidelines which wouldn’t be the classical ones that graphic designers like to use: a blog which is nothing else than their portfolio, or about some designs they like. My editorial guidelines were not to write about graphic design itself, but about the technologies that are in orbit around it, and thus without any advertisement for Apple, as it is a cliché that a graphic designer should use a Mac for his work. Not only it isn’t true but Adobe software is in fact better optimized for the hardware using the Windows 7 Operating System. That’s the reason why, in the traditional area of graphic design, still images, nearly everybody uses a Mac, even though that’s the one that needs the less processing power. But for motion design, where processing power is much more important, only half of the people do, even though I must admit the Prores video codec which comes with Final Cut Pro is a serious advantage. And then in the 3D area, most people use PCs.
Unfortunately, my blog having been left to rot for a few years, from quite a lot of visits thanks to an article about Tablet PCs usage for graphic designers, a subject which very few people had written anything about and quite a lot of people were interested about, I find my blog flooded by uninteresting spam comments instead of real comments left by people really interested in the subjects I had written about. That’s normal considering the content has become obsolete. I thought that was a pity, I therefore decided to renew all of that, starting up by changing the CMS I was using, as the old version of dotclear – a French CMS – I was using didn’t have any efficient anti-spam solution. I therefore switched to WordPress, even though the page footer, which I haven’t changed, suggests otherwise. Not because the latest Dotclear version was not good, it seems excellent, actually easier to use to use than WordPress, and the transition was of course much more simple even with the deep graphical modifications I’ve done to the aspect of the pages, but when I had done switching to that version locally on my computer with WampServer, I realized while uploading the new blog that it was incompatible with the two host solutions I pay for, even though they’re two different providers. Dotclear developers seem to have forgotten – since quite a long time ago – that the lambda blog creators (even though they’re not that lambda if they install the CMS by themselves instead of using an all in one online solution such as the paid for WordPress or Blogger) aren’t geeks, or companies, who own their own server. And shared hosting is generally limited to a very old PHP version… I am not using the latest version of WordPress for the exact same reason, but it still is a pretty recent version, the latest one I can use, and it already comes with its share of interesting new functionalities. That’s because, unlike Dotclear, the WordPress team has sticked for a very long time to an old version of PHP with end user compatibility in mind. But because of that, mainly because of the change in the link structure implied by a change of CMS developers, my ranking in search engines has dropped drastically, my content being old it was already not well ranked anymore, but that finished the bad which had already been done.
Switching to a new CMS has also been the occasion of creating an English version of this blog in parallel, and you are reading it, welcome. All of the articles before this one already existed before, but they were in French, I’ve translated all of them, except the ones who were obviously completely obsolete, which I deleted. There will be a lot of new articles this year, I hope you like my blog.