perfidy

This is the fifth (or sixth) incarnation of a website that first staggered, drunken and confused, from primordial ooze in the long ago days of 2003. 

Perfidy has had a sordid history of wooing and then discarding hopeful blog platforms. The first victim was blogger, where perfidy masqueraded under modestly clever nom-de-net "Johnny Two-Cents’. It was only weeks before frustration with the limitations (if not the cost) of blogger led to its unseemly abandonment.

Then began the ambitious task of creating our own blog. The first blog that actually had the name Perfidy lived on the expression engine platform. It was rudimentary and frankly rather sad. The second effort saw improvement and actually approached mediocrity. For an absurdly long time, that blog remained visible for the simple if lame reason that we never bothered to export its content. It’s departure into the outer darkness was little noticed. 

The third incarnation of perfidy (and the fourth overall, for those without a program) saw the big move to Wordpress and the kicking-to-the-curb of an increasingly outmoded and unpopular Expression Engine.

Giddy with the possibilities of Wordpress theming and high as a kite generally, the perfidy design steering committee selected an ill-fated experimental design. This was nearly instantly shit-canned in favor of the fourth incarnation (whose own colophon you can read) and by far longest-lived of all perfidy flavors. 

As the demands of work and children took their toll, ministers fell away. Buckethead was the last to fall, and certainly most guilty. The blog staggered on with a single minister. After a nearly four-year lapse a fortuitous (nigh on to miraculous) intersection of increasing skill and increasing time allowed this, the fifth incarnation, to take shape. 

In what is now a dirty habit, Wordpress was left crying at the altar. This new and shiny Perfidy is on yet another new platform: Drupal. This also marks the first time in almost a decade that all of the content is in the same place. Many immigrant laborers, toiling in the code mines deep below the Perfidious fortress retreat suffered greatly so that you might easily read the random thoughts of a passel of overprivileged retards from 2005.  

Though this grand new Perfidy in many regards replicates the look of the old and lame previous Perfidy, it is in fact actually and entirely new. In designing this new theme, there were two primary considerations:

1. Recapture the unique perfidious magic of the previous design
2. Change it so that aging eyes can actually read the damn thing

The Ministry design steering committee believes that both of these objectives have been met. Because no sane developer starts from scratch unless threatened with grievous bodily harm, the perfidy theme was stolen in large part from the work of others. Most notably in this case from the Writer theme by Bryan Braun. From his own description, he valued:

• Brutally simple design
• Fantastic typography
• Support for code snippets

That third item won't likely be a huge factor here, but we liked the first two a lot. If Bryan saw what we did with his menu, he'd probably hate that; but mostly we kept to his excellent design. Some changes include the aforementioned menu (moved to the side in memory of perfidies that have gone before), the very same link colors we've used since the start, the category icons that we love so much, and a few other minor changes. Body text is Merriweather, meta text is Lato. Enjoy, and tell us what you think.