Month: July 2010

My first journal paper has now finally been published. It is titled Developmental modelling with SDS and was published in Computers & Graphics in a special issue on procedural modelling. You can download a preprint of the paper in the papers section of my site. I started writing the paper in November last year, so it’s great to finally have it published. It was an interesting process, getting the paper reviewed, receiving the comments, addressing all the comments and modifying the paper accordingly (which also meant doing more experiments!), submitting the changes, getting it accepted, receiving the proofs from the editor, confirming the changes and doing some last minute edits, submitting the proof, waiting, waiting, getting a preview of the online version, and finally, today, receiving a nice final copy of the article … gah! There is a lot of work involved from all parties, and I didn’t even mention having to produce and format high quality images! Bazinga. Is the tedium of publishing in a journal worth it? At the moment I’m not sure.

Yep, it’s time again for a new website design. It’s only been two months since I wrote about how I migrated my site from a static content generator written by someone else to one I wrote myself incorporating some cool things. Statically generating the site turned out to need more effort than I was willing to put in, due to the edit/compile/install cycle. The other thing that bothered me was that my blog was running on a separate website, and although I had blog.bp.io map to it, I still couldn’t integrate it into my main site.

I considered three different systems when looking at building my new site: wordpress, drupal, and django. WordPress is a simple blogging software with some basic cms features. Drupal is a fully fledged cms that is actually quite nice to use. Django is a toolkit for building websites. Long story short, due to my laziness I went with wordpress, as it required minimal effort.

I originally wanted to organise the different things on my website (e.g., software, paper, code, drawings) properly (and wp3 does support this), but I went for the simple option in which everything is a wp post, and categories are used to distinguish between blog, game, and project related types. Once I changed my intended website model into one that was wordpress compatible, things got a lot easier.

As for Drupal and Django, both are great systems, just not the simplest option for a single user blog/cms. I had a lot of fun building a prototype blog with it, and I plan on using Django for a website in the future.

Hopefully this current set-up will last me more than two months. :)