About
Hello! My name’s Rob… let me explain:
Renaissance
Renaissance is a content management system on which I’ve been working on for many moons (many, many moons). I started it before most blogs even existed, let alone this one.
This blog serves three purposes,
- It’s a development journal.
- It’s a place for me to write about Renaissance in general, and everything that excites me about it.
- It’s a place for me to scratch my head and ask questions.
Renaissance is half way between a hobby and a job (although I’ve been coding for many years, I don’t really think of myself as a professional coder), and although it’s been through many iterations since inception and is really pretty stable, I still call it an alpha version. That said, this Wordpress blog is the first site in years (bar only two exceptions) that I’ve not built with Renaissance. It powers pretty much all my client work and many of my other projects.
If you’re interested in Renaissance and want to know more of the background, check out the sticky tag to the right.
History
As with many projects such as this, my adventures in the world of content management started when a client asked me if they could have a web site they could update themselves. Then another did. And another. This was around 2001.
I created one very simple CMS. It worked up to a point. It wasn’t called Renaissance. An iteration or two later and I’d come up with a completely new model, now called Renaissance. It’s changed hugely in its architecture and capabilities since then, but the essential visual style and the concepts behind the interface and work-flow have stayed pretty much unchanged for the past few years.
In many ways Renaissance is mainly a personal project, and as such I’ve done the vast majority of the work on it myself. There are no frameworks, APIs or other borrowed code. It’s all my own stuff. That said, my partner, Adeline, has also contributed significantly to the code at this point (especially the JavaScript and DOM functionality). With any luck she’ll be contributing a fair bit more in future.
Business
I’ve said Renaissance is largely a personal project, but it’s also a key part of Adeline’s and my business, db|design. It’s used to create all our client web sites, and adds massively to our productivity and what we can offer in that respect.
Adeline and I have recently launched a new business called The Late Night Partnership, of which db|design has become a department, in effect. More on that soon.
Me
Me? I’ve spent the last few years working freelance, doing design and marketing and building web sites for clients, and trying to find time for my own projects, such as Renaissance, in between. It’s worked reasonably well, but became more and more frustating as time went on. The dream of a good balance between client work and personal projects turned out to be a bit of a myth. Hence The Late Night Partnership. But more on that another time.
I’ve been writing code for about 16 years, first in C and assembler under DOS and a bunch of special purpose scripting languages, and more recently PHP, MySQL and related things for web development. I’ve always seen myself as a designer first and a bit of a dabbler when it comes to code, which is why I made a firm decision a while back not to learn any new languages and not to work on any other projects apart from Renaissance (I’m often really tempted to work on new stuff though!)
My design background and secondary attitude towards code have made Renaissance something really quite different. The interface is unlike any other CMS you’ve seen (although I’ve become pretty bored with it now), and it’s very powerful in terms of design and flexibility on the front end. Code-wise, I don’t follow design trends, framework, methodologies or anything like that at all, so it’s entirely my own thing.
On a more personal note, I live in Cambridge, drink a lot of tea and tend to work late.
You can contact me at rob@dpractice.com.
