I am an inveterate markup and CSS fiddler. I am never happy with any out-of-the-box web app. Not infrequently, what I come up with is worlds worse than what came out of the box, but that is the price of fiddling. (And I’m still proud of what I did with the repository I run. That puppy looks good, yo.)
Sometimes, though? It pays not to fiddle with stuff. I spent most of my last workday fiddling with Open Journal Systems’ markup and CSS. I came in today, ruthlessly copied the out-of-the-box defaults over my work, and am starting over. Why? Because I want to work with (okay, okay, rip off and change) other people’s journal designs, and if I fiddle with the markup and the base CSS, I can’t. Fiddling’s more trouble than it’s worth in this case.
I’m fiddling. A little. Journals without a logo now get MPOW’s logo as a default, and I’ve messed with the sidebar some because I don’t agree with how it’s organized. But most of it I’m just leaving alone, and when I get the urge to fiddle with it, I’m just gonna slap my hand good and hard to stop myself.
I used to think that the stupid mechanical overhead involved in fiddling with DSpace designs (upload, ant update, copy .wars, kill Tomcat, restart Tomcat; have I mentioned lately I hate Java?) was a bug. I’m starting to think that for inveterate fiddlers, it’s actually a feature.
