When I was a young and jobless programmer, I had the desire to create everything from scratch. Instead of relying on frameworks and blogging software, I was determined to reinvent the wheel. This behavior usually led to development cycles that quickly spun out of control and became much larger than the original goal.

Fast-forward half a decade. I was hired for my first web development job, and the job coerced me into my first framework, Zend Framework. I transitioned—albeit begrudgingly. Initially, I realized the business sense in using frameworks to speed up the development cycle. Especially when they come at the low, low price of free. But for a while I still convinced myself that frameworks were somehow bad—as if using one would be cheating.

About two weeks or so ago I was working on a personal project in my usual fashion when I found myself constantly muttering, “if this were Zend, I could simply…” It kind of dawned on me at that moment that frameworks really do make life easier. And that’s all on top of the improved security and (sometimes) performance they can bring to your projects.

What does it all mean? Well, that was my rather long-winded (and introspective) way of saying my blog is now powered by WordPress. I was honestly surprised at how easy it was to turn my old web design into a WordPress theme. This theme still may be a little rough around the edges, but it’s not half bad considering I both installed WordPress and created this theme in an afternoon.

HTML5 Logo

During the transition to WordPress, I found my website’s lack of browser compatibility rather disturbing. Running on the bleeding edge has its drawbacks—namely the bleeding part. Thanks to Microsoft brilliantly ignoring any HTML tags it doesn’t recognize, IE7 was entirely broken on my old website. There are some nice JavaScript hacks being put together to make IE compatible with HTML5, but they’re just that—hacks. Plus, I’m only using HTML5 for the semantic sugar. I have no legitimate reason to stick to HTML5 while its support is in its infancy.

In addition to stripping out HTML5 in its entirety, I scaled back my use of CSS3. Namely, my gratuitous use of the child combinators. They made my HTML code a lot cleaner, but it came at a rather large compatibility cost. I still use border rounding and transitions, but those don’t lead to a broken page if the browser doesn’t understand them.

I’m going to wrap this whole thing up by promising to put this WordPress to use by actually adding content. We’ll see how far that promise goes. Because I’ve never made a promise like that before.