In the last six weeks, I’ve launched or relaunched a bunch of sites.

I dove into Drupal for the first time. I waded further into making WordPress themes. I immersed myself into the workflow of Git, coming from a CVS/Perforce/Subversion background. Heck, I’ve even started tracking bugs and mapping out releases.

I’ve even gone so far as to open up the source to all the sites I maintain.

Part of it is necessity. My workplace uses Drupal and WordPress, and I’ve been called on to support these applications without knowing a thing about them. So what better way to learn them than to use them myself?

It helps that I’m pretty much tired of maintaining my hodge-podge system that puts a PHP layer over Movable Type. I’ve always been reluctant to hand over control of my sites entirely to a management system, and a long time ago, I decided to give Movable Type some responsibilities over my site — building syndication feeds, providing search mechanisms — but I wanted to control the presentation of the content.

I’m at an age where I don’t have patience to build infrastructure any more. So the past month and a half has been spent setting up the management systems to take care of that for me.

I also wanted to give my sites a bit of a makeover. The designs have been stuck in 2003 for a while now, so it’s time  to embrace rounded corners, gradients and imported fonts.

One thing I wish I could have done during this marathon was write about it. But when you’re busy doing, you don’t want to kill that momentum. It’s probably why developers hate writing documentation so much.

But I would like to reflect on a few of the things I encountered, and I hope to do so over the next few entries.