Design Work 
mental-distortions moves to WordPress
Well, when I was working on the redesign of this site, I knew I definitely wanted to implement some sort of blogging/news system in place to help manage my random ramblings. Putting things into HTML was fine and dandy, if I didn’t really post much, but I wanted to make this more of a regular habit of mine, to post my thoughts online.
At first, i started off playing around with CuteNews and it’s many variants. CuteNews is a pretty neat little news/blogging system, and it’s very easy to implement on a site. Just install it on your web host, and add a few lines of PHP and BAM! Instant news. However, where it fails is when you need your code to validate.
I began to investigate it further, looking to see if hacks of CuteNews existed that could generate valid XHTML, and I did find a few. There was one hack, where you tweek the rich text editor included with CuteNews that includes a line of javascript, and enables it to generate valid XHTML news posts, and then there were variants, such as AJ-Fork and CuteNews.ru which generated valid XHTML, however, once you implement the search features, that’s where it falls apart.
I don’t fancy myself a PHP expert. I am a designer first and foremost, but I can work with PHP, so I could probably go in and fix the XHTML generated to validate, but then, I started thinking, that maybe I should have my entire site searchable, and not just the news.
That’s when I felt that maybe WordPress was the way to go about it.
For those unfamiliar with WordPress, WordPress is a very simple opensource blog/CMS. Takes, but maybe, 5 minutes to install (and that’s being generous), a lot of pre-existing themes are available, very easy to build a theme for yourself and easily customizable. Not to mention the large number of plugins supported by the community allow for a lot of room to give it added functionality. And if you’re a developer stuck on having valid code, it does that as well.
In addition to managing your blog/news posts, you can also generate dynamic pages for your site, so it’s more or less an all-in-one solution for small-medium size web sites.
Since I wanted all the pages on my site searchable as well, I simply installed a plugin that allows for this and BAM! Instant site-wide searches.
Building a theme from scratch for this, of course, is nowhere near as easy as CuteNews, where you simply insert a few lines of code, but after a week or so of playing around with things, it shouldn’t be too difficult to figure out what goes where and what does what.
In the end, this proved to be the right choice for this site. Sure, there are other content management systems, such as Joomla, Drupal, but in the end, this is all I really needed. Simple news management and a searchable site… and valid code if you’re anal about having all your pages validate, like I am 
